A second person has died of the plague in Russia’s Irkutsk region, Russian media claimed on Tuesday.
As EmmanuelsBlog earlier announced, panic broke out last week when an employee of a Russian plague research institute in the remote Siberian region of Irkutsk died and hundreds of people she came into contact with were placed in quarantine.
Darya Shipilova, 28, was said to be working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia when she was exposed to pneumonic plague. She died on October 2.
Shipilova told medical staff she had accidentally broken a test tube holding live bacteria, according to the news outlet Lyudi Baikala.
Other countries have tightened border health controls despite Russia’s insistence that the plague researcher died from ‘unidentified pneumonia’, rather than the suspected ‘Black Death’ bacterium.
Russian local outlets are reporting a second person has died at Irkutsk’s district hospital after reportedly contracting the plague.
Independent Russian outlet The Insider cited Russia’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov as saying the public should only trust updates coming from the official health agency.
‘One should rely on official statements from Rospotrebnadzor (the national public health agency) rather than listening to various rumors and speculation,’ Peskov said.
