U.S. President Donald Trump on Alleged Russian Pathogen Leak: "We Will Help as Much as We Can"

[Financial News] U.S. President Donald Trump said he was closely monitoring an infectious disease leak at a Russian research institute and stated, "We will help as much as we can."
According to the local business publication Forbes, Donald Trump met with reporters at the White House on the 5th (local time), mentioned the alleged Russian plague leak, and said, "We are watching this issue very closely." He added, "I just heard about it. We will help them (Russia). We will help them as much as we can."
Trump claimed that "the germs have become relatively much stronger than before" and that the incident was "a big problem for Russia."
The previous day, the U.S. political news outlet Axios reported, citing a Trump administration official, that a 28-year-old female researcher at the Irkutsk Antiplague Research Institute of Siberia and Far East in the city of Shelekhov near Russia's Irkutsk Oblast accidentally broke a test tube containing plague pathogens on the 25th of last month. The researcher was hospitalized on the 29th of last month with symptoms of severe pneumonia and died during the night between the 1st and 2nd of this month.
Russia's federal agency responsible for infectious diseases, the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing (Rospotrebnadzor), announced on the 4th that the researcher in question died after being diagnosed with "pneumonia of unknown cause." The Russian government was reportedly managing about 200 people who had been designated for quarantine observation at the hospital where the researcher had been admitted. Officials said that the United States and the European Union (EU) were both aware of the possibility of a plague leak and were reviewing disease-control measures.


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