Russian authorities dismiss Siberian 'plague outbreak' rumors: “No risk of an epidemic”

[Financial News] With rumors circulating that plague, an acute infectious disease also known as the Black Death, was spreading in Russia’s Irkutsk region of Siberia, Russian health authorities and the Kremlin moved to quell them, saying, “There is no risk of an epidemic spreading.”
On the 7th (local time), according to local media including TASS, Russia’s Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing (Rospotrebnadzor) said that after completing an investigation into compliance with biosafety requirements in connection with an incident at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute, it had found no emergency during the handling of pathogenic microorganisms.
The latest “plague outbreak” rumor began after claims emerged that Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old researcher in her 20s working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute, had accidentally broken a test tube containing a live pathogen culture on the 25th of last month. According to the rumors, Shipilova inhaled the pathogen in aerosol form, her symptoms worsened from the 27th, and she was hospitalized on the 29th before dying in intensive care on the 2nd. Fears quickly spread, particularly on social media, that she might have died of “pneumonic plague,” which has a high fatality rate if not treated in time. Some outlets, including the UK’s Daily Mail, even reported that there had been a second death in the area.
Russian health authorities, however, strongly denied the claims. Rospotrebnadzor announced that detailed tests of samples from the deceased researcher had detected no pathogens associated with her work, and that the official cause of death was “pneumonia of unknown cause.”
The authorities added that after completing monitoring of 90% of the approximately 200 people who had been in contact with the deceased, they had found no health problems caused by an infectious disease. They said that the only infections identified among those contacts were two cases each of COVID-19 and rhinovirus, a virus that causes the common cold, and that no pathogens responsible for other infectious diseases, including plague, were found. Around 16,000 cases of acute respiratory viral infections (ARVI) are currently reported each week in Irkutsk Oblast, but the number has remained 12.6% below the epidemic threshold over the past two weeks, indicating a stable disease-control situation, according to reports.
The Russian government provided the World Health Organization (WHO) with detailed information about the incident, and the WHO is also said to have assessed that community-acquired pneumonia cases in Irkutsk pose no risk of an epidemic spreading.
The Kremlin also moved to curb rumors. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at a briefing, “A great deal of information about the disease-control situation is circulating in the media and on social media, but most of it is false,” and urged the public to “trust the official assessments of Rospotrebnadzor experts rather than baseless speculation.”


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