The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said the US is closely monitoring the case of a Russian laboratory worker who died last week after a reported accident at a plague research institute in Siberia. She died two days later on the night of 2 October at a regional hospital in the nearby town of Shelekhov. It remains unclear how she became unwell.
Unconfirmed reports in Russian media have suggested Shipilova may have been infected after a mishap at the laboratory. Officials have not publicly confirmed that account. Local media have reported that the institute has subsequently been locked down, with staff forced to sleep on the floor and on chairs.
He said family members were allowed to drop off food at a checkpoint while tests were carried out inside the building. Similar quarantine restrictions have been placed on several other hospitals in and around the city. Rubio, citing what Russians have released about the death, said it seemed a worker in the lab became infected and there was concern the disease may have spread internally.
Alexey Tsydenov, the head of the Buryatia region, which neighbours Irkutsk, initially wrote that Shipilova had died of plague, before editing his post to say she had “possibly” died of the disease. Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s health watchdog, said Shipilova died from “pneumonia of unknown aetiology”. It insisted that tests found no micro-organisms linked to her professional work and described the “sanitary and epidemiological” situation in the area as stable.
Authorities in the nearby city of Baikalsk briefly urged residents to avoid travelling to Shelekhov and surrounding settlements after what they said was unofficial information about a possible plague infection. They later deleted the post from social media. Locals are angry that they are not being told anything,” said Elena Trifonova, a journalist with People of Baikal, an exiled Russian media outlet specialising in Siberia.
Despite the lack of a confirmed diagnosis, precautionary measures appear to have been introduced across the region. The US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported on Monday that several hospitals in Irkutsk had been placed under quarantine. The outlet confirmed that staff from Shipilova’s workplace, the Irkutsk Anti-plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, had been kept inside the institute since 2 October.
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