GENEVA — A top official with the World Health Organization said Wednesday it doesn't know how a lab worker in Siberia died, and she urged Russia to provide more information about a case that prompted global concerns about suspected pneumonic plague.
Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO director of Epidemic and Pandemic Management, said the U.N. health agency doesn't know what the "causative agent" was behind the woman's Oct. 2 death, which unconfirmed reports in Russia blamed on pneumonic plague — a less common but severe form of plague that can spread from person to person.
In its tersely worded statements, Russia's public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, does not link the case to pneumonic plague, saying only that the lab worker had contracted pneumonia of “unknown” origin and that “extensive” testing found no evidence her illness was caused by any of the pathogens she worked with at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East.
“We don’t understand how she was infected,” Van Kerkhove said. “We need information in a timely way. We need regular information. We need answers to the follow-up of the questions that we have asked.”
“We have posed these questions to our colleagues in the Russian Federation. In fairness, they have responded. We’ve gone back with more questions,” she said.
The comments suggested the U.N. health agency has more questions than answers about the situation at the lab, which focuses on plague and was founded about a century ago to study the disease in Siberia, where it occurs naturally in wild animals.
Russia has released little information about the case
Russian authorities have kept a tight lid on information about the case, which has been surrounded by secrecy.
While it has raised global concerns, Russian state TV and other national state-controlled media have largely steered clear of the subject. Some news outlets withdrew earlier reports about the case.
Rospotrebnadzor said Sunday the lab worker was diagnosed with “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” meaning its origin was not known.
A state TV station in Irkutsk reported she died Oct. 2 in a hospital in Shelekhov, a town just outside Irkutsk. Officials have quarantined that hospital and were monitoring the worker's contacts.
Russia has said the pneumonia initially presented as a “typical” acute respiratory viral infection, the WHO has said, acknowledging that pneumonia is commonplace.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Russian authorities had indicated that no case of plague had recently been reported in the Irkutsk region, and that they had placed about 200 contacts in quarantine.
Russia says preventive measures are underway
U.S. President Donald Trump said he would discuss the issue during a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin because Wednesday is the Kremlin leader's 74th birthday.
“They’re sharing it a little bit with our people. We expect them to share it a lot with our people,” Trump said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier Wednesday that a Putin-Trump call hasn’t been set yet but could be organized quickly.
Asked if the incident was a sign that plague might be developed as a bioweapon, Trump said, “We don’t think so. We’re going to find out soon enough, but we don’t think so.”
When asked if the situation was similar to dealing with China on COVID-19 in his first term, Trump suggested Russia was staying relatively quiet, just as China did before the virus turned into a pandemic. “China didn’t say much and Russia is not saying much either, but they do say they have it very much under control,” he said.
Dr. Erica Schwartz, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the threat to the U.S. “is extremely low.” She travel from that area of Russia to the U.S. each year is limited — and mostly comes through New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Government agencies are working “to make sure that we know exactly if anyone from that area comes into the United States,” Schwartz said during a Wall Street Journal health forum Wednesday.
Russian health authorities reported a full range of preventive measures had been carried out — including tracing the dead woman’s contacts, medical monitoring and lab tests, the WHO said.
The Geneva-based organization cited media reports that a second employee had pneumonia of undetermined cause.
Health experts urge more Russian openness
Peskov referred all questions to Rospotrebnadzor, which does not mention suspected plague in its reports and has not responded to a request for comment.
In its latest statement Tuesday, the agency said “the sanitary and epidemiological situation in the Irkutsk region, the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov is calm.” Authorities were completing a “complex of prophylactic measures and medical observation over contacts,” it said, adding that so far they have found two cases of COVID-19 and two cases of rhinovirus.
“No other infectious pathogens have been found among contacts,” it said.
Judy Twigg, professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, noted that while the measures taken by Russian health authorities “have been swift and serious,” officials sought to play down the situation and “any statements that strayed from that party line ... were edited or deleted within hours.”
“What we are watching is less a failure to respond than a failure of candor,” Twigg said in written comments.
Vasily Vlassov, professor at the department of healthcare administration and economics at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, said the measures taken appeared “sensible,” focusing on treating the sick, isolating them and their contacts, looking for new cases and carrying out disinfection.
He said it wasn't clear whether more transparency was possible if those dealing with the situation didn’t have enough certainty, and “maybe, they still don’t.” Deceiving the public, however, “always turns out to be harmful,” he said.
Distrust of Russia’s official narrative is “natural” and “almost inevitable,” Vlassov said.
In the Soviet era, dangerous outbreaks of infection had “a thick veil of secrecy — people were told nothing.”
The lab worker who died was described as highly diligent
The news outlet Lyudi Baikala — or “People of Baikal” — identified the dead lab worker as Darya Shipilova, 28, and said she first was hospitalized with cold symptoms Sept. 29 and died three days later.
It quoted colleagues as saying she was a highly qualified and diligent researcher. They also emphasized that security rules at the facility are extremely strict.
The report quoted Shipilova's neighbors as saying disinfection experts did several cleanups of her apartment, leaving a strong antiseptic smell.
Shipilova’s mother, who worked as a doctor in the past, described her daughter as hard-working and dedicated, according to independent Russian news outlet Glubina, adding that she had not gotten official documents describing the cause of death.
Twigg noted that Russia criminalized “false information” about threats to public safety in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, “so silence is the one safe move for everyone below the top.”
“Personalist regimes without electoral accountability tend to treat bad news as a loyalty problem rather than focusing on the actual problem to be addressed,” she said.
She warned that “the public’s understandable reaction to the lack of information carries real dangers.”
“A government that is not believed when it says ‘there is no outbreak’ will not be believed when it must actually say ‘there is one; do the following.’ We saw this with COVID,” she said.
Pneumonic plague and the more well-known bubonic plague — also called the Black Death — are caused by the same bacteria, said Simon Clarke of the University of Reading in the U.K. Pneumonic plague results from breathing in the bacteria, causing an infection in the lungs.
The bacterium, called Yersinia pestis, has not been eliminated, but it is not spread very easily and it is treatable with antibiotics.
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Dasha Litvinova in Tallinn, Estonia, Collin Binkley in Washington, and Mike Stobbe in New York contributed.
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