WHO presses Russia for the cause of the Irkutsk lab worker’s death

Note

It started with one patient. According to Meduza and The Moscow Times, a 27- or 28-year-old employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East was admitted to hospital in Shelekhov, a town next to Irkutsk, on Sep 29 with severe pneumonia. Those outlets report that she was put on a ventilator and died on Oct 1; WHO later gave the date as Oct 2. Irkutsk officials have not publicly announced her death. We are not naming her.

On Oct 2, Irkutsk Governor Igor Kobzev said he had met Anna Popova, Russia’s chief sanitary doctor and head of the health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, who flew in personally, over information about “a suspected case of a particularly dangerous infection” in a resident. He did not name the pathogen and did not mention a death. He said every known contact was under observation, with no symptoms and negative lab results.

The word plague came from next door. Alexei Tsydenov, head of the neighboring Republic of Buryatia, wrote that the woman “who died of plague” in the Irkutsk region had not visited Buryatia. His post was later edited to say she had “possibly” died of plague, according to Meduza.

From there the story ran on unnamed sources. The exiled outlet Lyudi Baikala and the broadcaster REN TV, as carried by The Moscow Times, said she had reportedly broken a test tube of live bacteria while collecting samples; another version had her returning from Thailand. Several outlets called it pneumonic plague, the lung form that can spread between people. Counts of quarantined or hospitalized contacts ran from 189 to 197. The town administration of Baikalsk urged people not to travel to Shelekhov, citing unofficial information about plague, then deleted the post; REN TV deleted five posts about plague spreading in Shelekhov, Meduza reports.

On Oct 4, Rospotrebnadzor gave its answer, in a press-service statement carried by Interfax. It said her diagnosis was “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” that expanded tests of her samples found no microorganisms linked to her professional work, and that a biosafety commission, backed by an expert team sent on Popova’s order, found no accidents involving pathogens at the institute. It said her contacts were kept in hospital with daily lab tests, which turned up 2 cases of Covid-19 and 2 of rhinovirus and no other infectious pathogens. It called the situation in the region stable. The statement does not use the word plague, and it does not say what caused the pneumonia.

The scare has not fully cleared on the ground. On Oct 4, Lyudi Baikala reported three-week quarantines at Irkutsk city clinical hospitals No. 1, 3 and 10, the Ivano-Matreninskaya children’s hospital and a maternity hospital, as carried by Meduza. A health-sector source told the outlet that doctors talk openly about plague but that the diagnosis does not appear in hospital paperwork. Officials have not confirmed those closures.

Some context. Plague is a bacterial disease usually found in small mammals and their fleas, WHO says; Rospotrebnadzor’s Altai office describes a natural plague focus in the Altai Republic’s high mountains, where marmots carry it. WHO says common antibiotics can cure it if they are given early, while untreated pneumonic plague is always fatal and can kill within 18 to 24 hours of the first symptoms. Russia’s last registered human case was in July 2016, when a 10-year-old boy in the Kosh-Agach district of the Altai Republic caught bubonic plague while helping a relative skin a marmot; the regional Rospotrebnadzor office says early treatment saved him.