Plague Outbreak Leaves a High Alert White House ‘Aware, Monitoring… and Assessing Options’

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A 28-year-old woman was admitted to a Siberian hospital on September 29 and placed on a ventilator. Two days later, she was dead.

Her name was Darya Shipilova. She worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, a research facility in Siberia, and reports say she had been exposed to pneumonic plague.

The Trump administration is now following the fallout.

A White House official told Axios on Sunday that the administration is “aware, monitoring the outbreak, and assessing options.”

Russian news outlet Lyudi Baikala reported that Shipilova told medical staff she had accidentally broken a test tube holding live bacteria.

Her movements before she fell ill brought her into contact with roughly 200 people. Authorities are now monitoring every one of them over fears the disease could spread.

Irkutsk Governor Igor Kobzev addressed those numbers publicly, according to The Moscow Times.

He said none of the people under observation has shown signs of illness, and all of them have tested negative for the disease.

Regional authorities have also placed three hospitals under secure measures and imposed a mask mandate.

The hospital that treated Shipilova is among the quarantined facilities. The other two took in patients who had contact with her.

Pneumonic plague attacks the lungs.

Fever, shortness of breath and coughing up blood are its hallmark symptoms, and they typically appear between three and seven days after contact with the bacteria.

The first day of treatment carries the most weight.

Patients who receive antibiotics within 24 hours of infection face a fatality rate of around 17 percent. Without treatment, the disease is almost always fatal.

Outside the quarantine zones, a separate storyline has emerged. Claims are circulating that Russian authorities are trying to hide exactly what happened.

Reports also describe a shortage of the drugs used to treat plague in the region. Frightened residents have packed into pharmacies and medical facilities, demanding supplies.

Mikhail Favorov, a senior Russian epidemiologist, rejected the broken test tube account, The Moscow Times reported. He pointed to the protective gear worn by staff at the institute.

“It’s laughable. Someone working at the Anti-Plague Institute in Irkutsk wears a protective anti-plague suit,” Favorov said.

“If you break a test tube, the likelihood of infection is actually very low. In short, it doesn’t matter to the general public – they’ll believe the ‘broken test tube’ story.”

He added: “It’s absolutely hair-raising. We will not be told what really happened.”

Pneumonic plague is one of three forms of the disease, and the bacterium Yersinia pestis causes all of them.

The pneumonic form spreads when a person breathes in airborne droplets from an infected individual.

Septicaemic plague, the second form, infects the bloodstream.

People contract it through flea bites or by handling infected animals. Internal bleeding and tissue that turns black from necrosis rank among its symptoms.

Bubonic plague, the third form, is the one history knows as the Black Death. Flea bites spread it as well, and it produces fever, chills and painful, swollen lymph nodes called buboes.