Oct. 7 (UPI) — President Donald Trump said he would raise the subject of a deadly plague case in Russia with President Vladimir Putin “very soon” and would be able to shed more light on the situation as early as Wednesday.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday evening that he had “a call scheduled very soon” and was being kept updated by U.S. intelligence agencies.
“So far we are in very deep discussions. We will be able to report about it probably tomorrow,” said Trump.
The developments came as the State Department reiterated that Americans should leave Russia immediately after Daria Shipilova, a 28-year-old female employee of a remote Siberian anti-plague research lab, died Friday from “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” sparking speculation she had contracted the deadly bacterial lung infection.
Shipilova’s exposure may have resulted from her accidentally breaking a test tube containing the micro-organism.
Russian authorities have not given a cause of death but insist testing of all her contacts for pneumonic plague has come back negative, deny any mishap occurred at the lab and say the “sanitary and epidemiological situation” is “stable.”
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow in a health alert issued Tuesday for the Irkutsk region, over 3,000 miles to the east of the capital, said it was tracking reports of “associated quarantine measures in, and closures of, hospitals in Irkutsk,” warning of limited ability to assist U.S. citizens and of extra restrictions on movement within Russia by U.S. government personnel.
Endemic to rodents and the fleas that infest them across Africa, Asia and much of the Americas, plague is transmissible between humans through droplets in breath or from infected tissue.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Kevin Esvelt questioned whether the pathogen in question was actually plague or something more sinister.
“The evidence supports a tragic exposure to a lethal, presumably transmissible pathogen that Russia appears reluctant to publicly identify. Physical lockdown indicates it cannot be controlled with prophylactic antibiotics, implying engineered pan-resistance or that it isn’t plague at all,” Esvelt wrote in an online post.