The pneumonia death of a lab technician at a plague research facility in Russia is raising crucial questions for American officials — with Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling Tuesday for greater transparency from Moscow.
“I think it's incumbent upon Russia to share more information with the world,” Rubio told reporters after arriving in Reykjavik, Iceland, for an official visit.
Rubio also said U.S. officials were monitoring the situation “very closely, hour by hour.”
The scarcity of details surrounding the death of the worker, identified by Russian media as 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, leaves unanswered why she fell ill and whether others have been infected by whatever sickened her.
“It's really critical to get the diagnosis right. There are conflicting stories around it,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Axios. “Getting the real story, the true facts of the situation out in the open is critical to everything else that follows in the response.”
Russian officials haven’t publicly identified the pathogen that sickened Shipilova, who worked at the Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East in Irkutsk.
It's also unclear where and how she was infected, with Russia's national health agency, Rospotrebnadzor, disputing social media rumors that she dropped a laboratory test tube containing live bacteria.
The available information has raised fears that she contracted pneumonic plague, the most virulent form of the disease that killed an estimated 50 million people during Europe's infamous Black Death during the 14th century.
Russian health officials said in a memo Tuesday that they had tested the dead woman's contacts and found “no presence of dangerous infectious disease pathogens,” according to The Associated Press, which said it got the note from the World Health Organization.
“Based on available data, laboratory test results, and health status, medical monitoring for 100% of the contacts has now been concluded,” the memo said. “The epidemiological situation is stable and remains under monitoring.”
A WHO spokesperson said Tuesday that the research facility in Irkutsk “studies dangerous pathogens, including plague, in a part of Siberia where plague occurs naturally in wild animals.”
Russia hasn't asked the WHO to send experts to help determine whether the lab worker died of pneumonic plague, spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said during a video briefing to the United Nations.
“The WHO initial risk assessment, from the information available, estimates the risk to be moderate to low for Irkutsk, a low risk for the Russian Federation as a whole, and very low for the WHO European region,” Lindmeier said.
On Monday, President Donald Trump called the situation a “big problem for Russia” but said he hadn't spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin about it.
Trump also told reporters that the U.S. would “help anybody that has that kind of a problem.”
“It's a rough disease, you know,” he said. “That's a disease we used to be able to control, but somehow those microbes have gotten stronger and smarter. They're like an army ... and things that used to work on pneumonia don't work as well anymore.”
Dr. Glenn Wortmann, the section director of infectious diseases at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, said Tuesday that the bacteria that cause plague don’t “travel very far” and that a person would “really need to be face-to-face” with an infected person to get pneumonic plague.
“The chance of this spreading widely in Russia and then extending here to the U.S. will not happen, not with this type of bacteria, because it’s not spread easily and we have antibiotics to stop it from spreading,” Wortmann told the AP.
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