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Russia’s health regulator said Thursday that reports that a second person had fallen ill following the death of a worker at a plague research laboratory in Siberia were false.
Preventive measures have been completed for all individuals who had contact with the first worker who died last week, and no dangerous pathogenic microorganisms have been detected, said the Russia health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor.
Russian authorities have said 28-year-old Daria Shipilova died last Friday from pneumonia of an as-yet-unestablished origin. Shipilova was a lab employee at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, located in the town of Shelekhov, prompting authorities in Russia to swiftly roll out a series of precautionary anti-epidemic measures that caught global attention.
Rospotrebnadzor said she died of an unknown type of pneumonia and that no relevant pathogens had been found in anyone who came into contact with her. Officials in Russia said she was vaccinated and therefore “immune to the dangerous infections with which she worked.”
A security person wearing a face mask looks out from the door of an infectious diseases hospital in the town of Shelekhov, where an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute recently died, a mysterious fatality that has caused international concern. (Tatyana Makeyeva/AFP/Getty Images)
The World Health Organization initially said it estimated the risk of the Russia case to the public as low, based on what had been made known, but told a news conference on Wednesday it could not make a fuller risk assessment due to insufficient information from the Russian authorities.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of WHO, said the global health body had offered assistance to Russia and also repeated a request to verify “media reports of a second employee with pneumonia of undetermined cause.” Those reports started with a Russian media outlet and were spread to English-language audiences by the Daily Mail in Britain, based on a subsequent pneumonia-like death at an Irkutsk hospital.
Health Canada has told CBC News it is also monitoring the situation, though it sees no risk to Canada at this time. According to the agency, the last recorded human case of plague in this country was in 1939.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Erica Schwartz said Wednesday the risk to the U.S. from an unconfirmed pneumonic plague case in Siberia was extremely low, but the agency was prepared to monitor and screen travellers.
Two-hundred people have been placed under medical observation in Siberia, Russia, after a laboratory worker died after a reported accident at a plague research facility. The World Health Organization says the public health risk remains low.
The CDC has a port health station at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York that can conduct surveillance and screening for travellers from the region entering the United States, Schwartz said. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the agency planned to set up screening there.
A spokesperson from Health and Human Services said there are about 200 individuals per year from the Siberian region who travel to the United States. Direct flights between Russia and the United States have been suspended since the start of the Ukraine war in 2022.
