No plague cases have been detected in the Siberian city where a recently deceased woman worked at a plague research facility, Russian authorities said on Oct. 6.
“No case of this dangerous disease has been recorded in the city of Irkutsk,” Russian officials told the World Health Organization (WHO), according to a statement read by WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier during a briefing in Geneva.
The statement came after Russian health agency Rospotrebnadzor said that no infectious diseases had been reported among staff at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East over the past 10 days, apart from several cases of COVID-19 and rhinovirus. The 28-year-old worker, who died on Oct. 2, worked at the institute, which studies the plague and other pathogens.
The agency also said that extensive testing found no microorganisms in the deceased woman’s body linked to her work.
Officials have said that the woman was diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown origin.
Lindmeier told the briefing on Tuesday that Russian authorities “are looking into whether pneumonic plague caused her death.”
He also said that all of the patients’ contacts have reportedly been identified, and none have shown symptoms of illness.
The WHO has pegged the risk at present to Irkutsk as moderate to low, to Russia as a whole as low, and to Europe as very low. The risk assessment will be updated once more information becomes available.
U.S. officials have said they are monitoring the situation.
“There was a worker at the lab that was infected and there’s concern that that [it] could have spread, at least internally,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Monday.
“I don’t think it’s cause for alarm, but it is cause for focus and the cause to just keep an eye on it, and we’re doing that.”
“We’re looking at it very strongly. We just heard about it,” President Donald Trump told reporters separately.
He added that the United States would assist Russia.
“It is always very good when mutual assistance is offered,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday during a press conference in Moscow.
Peskov encouraged people to look to Rospotrebnadzor’s statements, rather than “rumors” and “speculations.”
Rubio said Tuesday while visiting Iceland that Russia needs to share more information about the situation with the world.
“Maybe it’s bigger than we thought. We don’t know,” he said. “But I think it would be reckless at this moment, given the limited information we still have, to speculate about what this might or might not be or what this is or what this isn’t.”
Elena Sofina, deputy head of the Shelekhov district near Irkutsk, where a local hospital was placed under quarantine, said that “a dangerous diagnosis” had not been confirmed and that 60 percent of those placed under quarantine as a precaution had already been released.
Reuters contributed to this report.