Daria Shipilova walked into a hospital in the Siberian town of Shelekhov on Sept. 29 with pneumonia symptoms. Two days later, she was dead.
Doctors had placed the 28-year-old on a ventilator in between, the Moscow Times reported. Shelekhov sits roughly 2,500 miles east of Moscow.
Shipilova worked as a technician at the anti-plague laboratory in Irkutsk, a facility that handles rare diseases. Irkutsk is a vast region of eastern Siberia, north of Mongolia.
Now a local report points to an incident at her workplace.
The independent outlet People of Baikal reported that Shipilova is believed to have accidentally smashed a test tube containing pneumonic plague the week before she was hospitalized.
Russia’s health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, has described the cause differently. The agency attributed her death to “pneumonia of unknown origin”
Officials have moved to isolate anyone who may have been exposed.
As of Saturday, 189 people who may have come into contact with Shipilova were in quarantine, a group that includes the other staff at the Anti-Plague Institute.
Up to 200 people are now believed to be under medical observation. Three hospitals are on lockdown.
Irkutsk Governor Igor Kobzev said regional authorities held an emergency meeting over the weekend to discuss the “particularly dangerous infection” at the lab.
Kobzev said no one else is showing signs of illness.
Rospotrebnadzor said some people who underwent “anti-epidemic measures” tested positive for other conditions, including colds or COVID.
Few details have come out of the region. Russia has little free press, and information on the outbreak remains sparse.
The Russian tabloid Mash published a separate account. It reported that Shipilova fell ill after returning from a work trip to Buryatia, a neighboring region where a plague outbreak occurred earlier.
The disease in question is pneumonic plague, which spreads from person to person through infected breath.
Plague more commonly travels through the bites of infected fleas on rodents, the same route linked to the Black Death.
That pandemic struck in the 14th century and killed between 75 and 200 million people worldwide. It claimed between 30 and 60% of Europe’s entire population.
The National Emerging Special Pathogens Training and Education Center says untreated plague causes swelling, shortness of breath and chest pains.
Symptoms usually begin between one and three days after exposure and worsen fast.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says antibiotics can cure plague when doctors treat patients quickly.
Plague is not new to the region.
Russia’s last recorded case came in 2016 in Altai, near the Kazakhstan border, where a 10-year-old boy contracted the disease after butchering a marmot. Mongolia identified 137 outbreaks across 17 regions in 2023.
The reports have reached Washington. A Trump administration official told Axios that the White House “is aware, monitoring the outbreak, and assessing options,”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed the situation Monday. He said the reports were cause “for focus,” not for alarm.
“We know what we know, obviously, about whatever the Russians have provided. It seems that there was a worker at the lab that was infected, and there’s concern that that, you know, could have spread,” he told reporters.
Rubio added that the administration, citing the “very limited travel between the US and Russia,” plans for now to “just keep an eye on” the outbreak.
