A researcher’s death at a secretive Russian facility has raised fears that the world may not be getting the full story
The death of a researcher who worked at an obscure research facility in a country not known for transparency. Denials that any outbreak had occurred due to the facility. Confusion as various authorities promised that they would find out more.
All of this may remind you of the early days of Covid-19, but they apply equally well to a situation currently playing out in Eastern Siberia.
Darya Shipilova was a 28-year-old researcher at the Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East in Irkutsk. On October 2, she died of pneumonia at a hospital in the smaller city where she lived, Shelekhov, which is just southwest of Irkutsk. From there, the rumors and allegations swirled and grew.
The Russian authorities have reassured other countries and international organizations that there is nothing to worry about. At the same time, there have been reports of quarantines and a possible lab accident. Moreover, Russia has a dark history of experimenting with biological weapons, one of which is plague.
Would Russia tell the truth if a virulent form of it escaped a laboratory? It’s hard to know. And with the specter of Covid-19 and the havoc it wrought hovering in the world’s collective rearview mirror, the possibility of an outbreak in Siberia has put observers on edge.
That old Black Death
Even though the word “plague” can be used for any rapidly spreading deadly disease, the malady caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis has earned the term because of its historical importance.
In fact, there have been multiple widespread outbreaks of plague throughout history up to and including the 20th century, according to researchers. The most famous one took place in the 14th century and was known as the Black Death. The massive wave of deaths came to an end by the end of that century, but by then it had killed more than one-third of the population of Europe and changed the fate of the survivors and the countries they lived in forever.
The main reason plague hasn’t remained the same scourge it used to be is that we eventually came to understand how it spreads better. The bacterium’s main hosts are fleas that live on small mammals, especially rodents of all kinds. It manages to infect but not kill them so rapidly that they die off entirely; plague remains in “reservoirs” within these populations of animals, occasionally jumping out into larger animals or humans after they are bitten by the fleas. In the modern age, pest control has helped to keep plague mostly out of human populations.
That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been outbreaks. For example, in the US, such outbreaks have occurred mainly in the western states, where plague continues to circulate among prairie dogs, squirrels, chipmunks and other small mammals. There have also been larger outbreaks in Africa, usually spread by rats or mice, which have killed hundreds and infected thousands, as happened in Madagascar in 2017.
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