Worries grow about suspected plague outbreak in Russia
Russian authorities and Trump administration officials are monitoring a possible pneumonic plague outbreak in Russia, after a laboratory worker died of an undisclosed illness. The woman, in her late 20s, reportedly worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Institute of Siberia and the Far East and died of pneumonia of unknown origin, according to Rospotrebnadzor, a Russian health...
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.
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