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Officials in Russia’s Irkutsk region advised against traveling to a town where a hospital patient may have died of plague. They later deleted the post.

The administration of Baikalsk, a city in the Irkutsk region, published a Telegram post urging residents not to travel to Shelekhov, a satellite town of Irkutsk where a hospital patient may have died of pneumonic plague. It deleted the post two hours later, People of Baikal reported.

Officials in Russia’s Irkutsk region advised against traveling to a town where a hospital patient may have died of plague. They later deleted the post.

The administration of Baikalsk, a city in Russia's Irkutsk region, issued a Telegram post advising residents not to travel to Shelekhov, a nearby town, following the death of a hospital patient who may have succumbed to pneumonic plague. However, the post was removed from the platform just two hours later, according to the local news outlet People of Baikal.

This deletion came shortly after the national television channel Ren TV removed five posts on its social media regarding the potential spread of plague in Shelekhov. Prior to these actions, Buryatia's head, Alexei Tsydenov, amended a post to state that the deceased woman had "possibly died of plague" instead of definitively claiming the cause of death.

On October 2, it was reported that Daria Shipilova, a 28-year-old patient at Shelekhov District Hospital, had died of pneumonic plague, though this has not been officially confirmed, with authorities only acknowledging the involvement of a "particularly dangerous infection." In response to the rumors, residents of both Shelekhov and Irkutsk have reportedly been stocking up on antibiotics capable of combating the plague pathogen.

The last recorded case of plague in Russia occurred in 2016, when a 10-year-old child in the Altai Republic became ill.

Written by urgent.news from Meduza (English)'s reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.

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