Plague risk in Russia ‘low’ after death of lab technician, UN health agency says

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 06 (APP): The UN World Health Organization (WHO) has said that it deemed the public health risk in Russia to be “low”, following reports that a laboratory technician had died of plague.

Reports that pneumonic plague had killed a 28-year-old woman named Darya Shipilova, who had been working for the anti-plague institute in Siberia’s Irkutsk region, sparked serious concern.

“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.

At United Nations Headquarters in New York, UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric reacted cautiously to a series of questions, saying that WHO was in the lead for the UN system and in contact with the Russian authorities and wasaof the view that there was a low a low risk to public health.

Ms 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.

WHO’s 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.

Russia has sought to downplay reports that Ms Shipilova died of plague, even as US President Donald Trump said Washington was closely monitoring the situation and offered help.

“We’re looking at it very strongly, we just heard about it,”  Trump told reporters at the White House when asked what Washington was going to do about the risk of plague coming from Russia.

“We’ll help them, we’ll help them as much as we can.”

The Russian news outlet People of Baikal, citing unnamed sources close to the regional security services, said Ms Shipilova may have contracted pneumonic plague from a broken test tube.

Other media reported a possible link between her death and a lab accident at the facility.

As many as 200 people with whom she may have had contact were under quarantine, the People of Baikal outlet added, without elaborating.

But Russian officials stressed that post-mortem tests had not detected the disease.