Russia has hit back at Donald Trump’s offer to help tackle the country’s ‘plague outbreak’, mockingly offering to return the favour after the US experienced its own outbreak in June.
Panic broke out last week when a female lab worker died after reportedly being exposed to the pneumonic plague at a research institute in Siberia.
Hundreds of people she had come into contact with were placed in quarantine after Darya Shipilova, 28, told medical staff she had accidentally broken a test tube holding live bacteria at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia. She died on October 2.
And local media on Tuesday claimed a second person had died from the plague in Russia’s Irkutsk region.
Speaking on Monday, President Donald Trump revealed the US will ‘help’ Russia cope with the outbreak of the disease.
He said: ‘Well, we’re looking at it very strongly. We just heard about it, and they call it pneumonia.
‘And pneumonia, you know, years ago you could treat pneumonia easier. The microbes and the germs have gotten stronger disproportionately, but we’ll help them.’
Russia issued a scathing response to Trump’s promise of help, with its health agency Rospotrebnadzor saying in a statement: ‘The Russian Federation is ready to assist the US in combating infectious disease outbreaks.’
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Speaking on Monday, President Donald Trump revealed the US will ‘help’ Russia cope with the outbreak of the disease.
A team of Russia’s Irkutsk anti-plague institute during laboratory work
Russia, it stressed, ‘possesses extensive practical and scientific experience in ensuring epidemiological well-being, both domestically and internationally.’
It said Russia was ‘prepared to provide the US side with specialists, laboratory equipment and highly effective diagnostic and preventive tools’, to help address a range of worrying infectious disease outbreaks.
Among other things, it highlighted a ‘significantly worsened’ measles situation in three US states, and a ‘fatal case of plague’ recorded in New Mexico in June.
‘The situation regarding dangerous infectious diseases remains unstable,’ the statement said, also alleging outbreaks of typhus and Legionnaires’ disease had been reported.
Russia insists the plague researcher died from ‘unidentified pneumonia’, though neighbouring countries including Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are tightening border health controls amid reports it was the pneumonic plague.
It is feared Ms Shipilova died from the suspected Black Death bacterium – which infamously killed millions in Europe during the Middle Ages.
Now the Kremlin is scrambling to cover up the details as Russian media outlets report a second person has died at Irkutsk district hospital after allegedly contracting the plague.
Russian plague reports have allegedly been disappearing across national media, including one from Moscow’s Channel 5 broadcaster and one nationally distributed daily newspaper, Kommersant.
Independent Russian outlet The Insider said on October 2 the federal television channel REN TV also deleted all five of its publications about the plague in the Irkutsk region.
The administration of Baikalsk, a city in the Irkutsk region near the Mongolian border, published a Telegram post on October 3 urging residents not to travel to the Shelekhov district.
‘Due to unofficial information about a confirmed case of plague in a person in the city of Shelekhov, we ask you to limit visits to Shelekhov and nearby settlements until the circumstances surrounding this threat are clarified,’ the Baykalsk city administration said in a post.
She was reportedly working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia when she was exposed to pneumonic plague
A view of the Medical Assistance and Rescue Centre, an infectious diseases hospital, in the town of Shelekhov in the Irkutsk region
Ms Shipilova, left, died in the early hours of October 2 after developing ‘pneumonia of unknown aetiology,’ according to Russian officials
It deleted the post two hours later, independent local news outlet Lyudi Baikala reported.
Russia’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said the public should only trust updates coming from the country’s official health agency Rospotrebnadzor.
‘One should rely on official statements from Rospotrebnadzor rather than listening to various rumors and speculation,’ Mr Peskov said.
On October 4, the agency stated that Ms Shipilova died of ‘pneumonia of an unspecified type’ and assured that ‘the sanitary and epidemiological situation in the Irkutsk region and the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov is stable’.
Russian authorities denied Tuesday that they were imposing anti-plague measures.
‘We wish to clarify that the document and information in question do not originate from official sources and are untrue,’ Rospotrebnadzor said on Telegram.
‘No such decisions have been made at this time,’ it said, stressing that the health situation in the region was stable.
However, according to exiled opposition website People of Baikal, doctors in the region are speaking openly about the plague.
Locals have reported seeing people in PPE, including suits and masks, while workers at Irkutsk’s aluminium factories and nursery personnel are required to wear masks.
And online searches for the word ‘plague’ – ‘chuma’ in Russian – are up 5,000 per cent from this time last year, according to The Times.
Up to five hospitals in the Irkutsk area are in ‘epidemic’ mode, according to reports, with hundreds of staff and patients barred from leaving.
City Clinical Hospitals No1, No3, and No10 and the Ivano-Matreninskaya Children’s Hospital have been closed for a three-week quarantine, according to Lyudi Baikala.
Relatives of a woman giving birth at one of Irkutsk’s maternity hospitals also reported to the outlet that it had imposed a quarantine.
Ms Shipilova became unwell while on a field expedition with colleagues in Buryatia, beside Russia’s eastern border with Mongolia.
She was admitted to hospital on September 29 and placed on a ventilator but died three days later in Shelekhov, a satellite city of Irkutsk.
She came into contact with roughly 200 people, who are now being monitored over fears of an outbreak.
It has come to light that Ms Shipilova had personally worked with Yersinia pestis – the bacterium responsible for plague and the medieval Black Death – in laboratories at her workplace.
Immediately after Ms Shipilova’s death, Russia’s chief state sanitary doctor Anna Popova personally flew to Irkutsk to control the response to a ‘particularly dangerous infection’ – yet she has not spoken publicly.
A worker in full protective gear is filmed by residents of Shelekhov in Russia’s Irkutsk region as the local hospital is partially shut following the death of a young woman
Governor Alexey Tsydenov from neighbouring Buryatia initially referred to Ms Shipilova as ‘the woman who died from plague’, before toning it down to say she ‘may have died from plague’.
Mikhail Favorov, a senior Russian epidemiologist, dismissed the broken test tube explanation, according to the Moscow Times.
Mr Favorov said: ‘It’s laughable. Someone working at the Anti-Plague Institute in Irkutsk wears a protective anti-plague suit.
‘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.’
Regional authorities are implementing a ‘comprehensive set of anti-epidemic measures’, according to Maxim Modin, the mayor of the Shelekhovsky district in eastern Russia, near the Mongolian border.
The inpatient facility at the hospital where the lab technician was treated has been placed under quarantine, and several departments have stopped discharging or admitting patients, Mr Modin added.
Pneumonic plague causes a severe lung infection, with symptoms including fever, shortness of breath and coughing up blood, which typically begin to show between three and seven days after contact.
Fatalities from pneumonic plague drop to around 17 per cent if treated with antibiotics within the first 24 hours of infection. However, the disease is almost always fatal if left untreated.
Reports claim that drugs used to treat the disease are running out in the region, leaving terrified residents piling into pharmacies and medical facilities demanding supplies.
According to the World Health Organisation, pneumonic plague is even more severe than bubonic plague, the form of plague associated with the Black Death, which killed millions across England during the 14th and 15th centuries.
