Russian leader Vladimir Putin has been accused of a cover-up after the death of a worker at a plague research lab in Siberia, as the Daily Star reported this week. There are fears of a leak and that it may be linked to experiments with plague-infested squirrels to turn the Black Death disease into a bio-weapon, but Russian officials deny there was even an accident.
What happened at the lab?
Daria Shipilova, 28, fell ill after apparently dropping and breaking a test tube containing plague bacteria at a lab. She died from pneumonia of “unknown origin” three days later. Other workers have been quarantined. Russian authorities maintain there’s no outbreak, but there are worries the plague could spread.
What is the plague and its forms?
The plague is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. There are three forms: bubonic, the most common, affects the lymph nodes; septicaemic affects the blood; and the rarer pneumonic plague, the type in question in this incident, is the deadliest and affects the lungs.
Symptoms, spread, and treatment
Symptoms of pneumonic plague include shortness of breath, chest pain, fever, and coughing up blood, usually coming on within 24 hours. The mortality rate is nearly always fatal unless treated with antibiotics. Bubonic plague is usually spread to humans through flea bites, while pneumonic plague is typically spread by breathing in droplets of infected air from a human or animal. It needs close contact to spread and is less infectious than Covid, for example.
Historical and modern context
There are vaccines, but they’re not often used and aren’t reckoned to be very effective in preventing pneumonic plague. Scientists think pneumonic plague was responsible for most of the 50 million Black Death fatalities across Europe in the 14th century. There are about 2,000 human cases worldwide annually, mostly in Africa, and it’s often found in rodents, including squirrels and their fleas.
In 1347, Mongol forces wreaked havoc by flinging plague-infested corpses into the besieged Crimean city of Caffa. In the 1940s, Japanese forces dropped plague-infected fleas over China, killing thousands. Both the Soviet Union and the US experimented with weaponizing plague in the early Cold War, while the secret Operation Cauldron in 1952 saw British plague tests carried out on animals off the coast of Scotland. Experts say the pneumonic plague does have the potential to be weaponized.
Current risk assessment
There’s little chance of a plague epidemic according to the World Health Organisation, and the UK Health Security Agency says the risk to the British population is currently very low.
