Nearly 200 people in the Irkutsk region of Russia were hospitalized on suspicion of plague infection. The measure was taken after the death of an employee at a Russian plague research institute in the remote Siberian region, said The Moscow Times.
The publication states that some of the 189 people have symptoms of the disease, but the infection has not yet been confirmed.
The victim of pneumonic plague was a 27-year-old female employee of the anti-plague institute. According to one account, she had returned from a business trip to Buryatia, where a plague focus was registered at the border with Mongolia. But other sources said that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing a dangerous bacterium in the laboratory while collecting material for diagnosis.
She was hospitalized on September 29 at Shelekhov Hospital with pneumonia symptoms and was placed on a ventilator, but died two days later. All hospital staff were isolated, and the institution itself was closed for quarantine.
Read more: Scientists solve a 1,500-year mystery and find the origin of the world’s first pandemic
The official Tass agency confirmed that there was a diagnosis of pneumonia of unknown etiology in an employee of the anti-plague institute in the Irkutsk region, but minimized the incident stating that “a special set of measures was organized and carried out”.
According to the agency, the supervisory body Rospotrebnadzor clarified that expanded testing of the patient’s samples did not find microorganisms associated with her professional activities. It was also communicated that the employee had not recently traveled to Buryatia.
The governor of the Irkutsk Region, Igor Kobzev, said he held an emergency meeting of the sanitary and anti-epidemic commission together with the head of Rospotrebnadzor, Anna Popova. According to him, all individuals who had contact with the employee identified were placed under medical supervision. “So far, they show no signs of the disease and the laboratory test results are negative,” Kobzev said.
Alexei Tsydenov, governor of the Buryatia region, said in a post on his Telegram channel on Saturday that a woman in the neighboring Irkutsk region had “died, perhaps of plague.”
The U.S. State Department, in a statement to Al Jazeera, said Washington is “monitoring the situation closely with the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and our other interagency partners.” “We encourage Russian authorities to share accurate information quickly and openly,” said the State Department official in the statement.
Pneumonic plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, usually found in small mammals and their fleas. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), plague is highly contagious and can be fatal if not treated promptly.
The Moscow Times reported that the last recorded case of plague in Russia was in 2016, in Altai – when a 10-year-old boy fell ill — he was skinning a marmot carcass, and was infected through damaged skin. Thanks to timely treatment, the boy survived.
Natural plague foci persist in Mongolia. In 2023, Mongolia’s National Center for the Study of Zoonotic Infections identified 137 of these foci in 17 regions of the country, including areas near the border with Russia.
