Russia’s health regulator said Thursday that reports of a second person falling ill following the death of a worker at a plague research lab in Siberia are not true.
In a statement published by Russian news agencies, the regulator denied what it called “fake information circulating on social media regarding a second case of illness.”
It said it had completed checks on all the contacts of the dead woman, adding: “No health issues related to an infectious disease were detected, and the results of nearly 5,000 laboratory tests showed no dangerous pathogenic microorganisms.”
The Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East worker died on Oct. 2. The cause of death was pneumonia of unknown etiology, Russian officials have said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had suggested on Wednesday that reports of a second death were false. He said that people should rely on information from Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s health watchdog.
The World Health Organization (WHO) earlier in the week requested verification from Russia of reports of a second anti-plague institute worker dying.
Officials made the request after seeing two reports, one from the UK’s Mirror newspaper and another from a Serbian outlet, a WHO spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
The Mirror cited Russian news outlets without specifying any, while the Serbian outlet pointed to a report from the Daily Mail, another British publication, which cited unnamed local media.
The WHO has a surveillance hub that monitors media sources worldwide, Abdirahman Mahamud, the WHO’s director of health emergency response operations, told reporters during an Oct. 7 briefing.
When the hub picks up what the WHO calls a signal, workers try to determine whether the sources are reliable.
“If we see it’s credible based on the triangulation of the data, we go to member state to verify that event,” he said.
Some local and international authorities have said that plague was suspected or being investigated as the cause of death.
Health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said the woman died of an unknown type of pneumonia and that no relevant pathogens had been found in anyone who came into contact with her.
It has not yet said what caused the pneumonia that killed her or how she fell ill. Pneumonia, a lung infection, can have a variety of causes, including plague, as well as other bacterial infections or viral respiratory diseases, such as flu or COVID-19.
Two cases of COVID-19 were detected among contacts of the deceased worker, Rospotrebnadzor said previously.
It’s still unclear what killed the worker, whom Russia has acknowledged died, WHO officials said on Wednesday.
“We would like more information to understand which laboratory tests were conducted, which pathogens were evaluated, and if this individual didn’t die from plague, then how did she die?” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s director of epidemic and pandemic management, told reporters during the briefing.
Reuters contributed to this report.