WHO says ‘low’ risk in Russia following plague reports

A view of the Medical Assistance and Rescue Centre, an infectious diseases hospital in the town of Shelekhov in the Irkutsk region of Russia on Oct 5.

GENEVA – The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Oct 6 that it deemed the public health risk in Russia to be low, following reports that a laboratory technician had died of plague.

A worker at the anti-plague institute in Siberia’s Irkutsk region reportedly died of pneumonic plague, and news of the death sparked alarm last week.

“The WHO initial risk assessment from the information available estimates the risk to be moderate to low for Irkutsk, a low risk for the Russian Federation as a whole, and very low for the WHO European region,” the UN health agency’s spokesman Christian Lindmeier said.

“A woman who worked at a laboratory in Irkutsk oblast has died, and the authorities are looking into whether pneumonic plague caused her death,” he told a press briefing in Geneva.

The lab technician, named as 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, worked at an institute that studies dangerous pathogens in a part of Siberia where plague occurs naturally in wild animals, the spokesman said.

“The illness initially presented as a typical acute respiratory viral infection,” he said.

Lindmeier said Russian authorities had identified the people she was in contact with and had been monitoring them.

“According to the test results, no pathogens of dangerous infectious diseases were detected among any of the contacts,” he said.

“WHO is following the situation closely, working with headquarters to keep other countries informed” and stands ready to support the Russian authorities if they ask, he added. AFP