UN health agency wants more details from Russia on suspected pneumonic plague case

GENEVA, Oct 8, (AP): A top official with the World Health Organization said Wednesday it doesn’t know how a lab worker in Siberia died, and she urged Russia to provide more information about a case that prompted global concerns about suspected pneumonic plague.

Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO director of Epidemic and Pandemic Management, said the UN health agency doesn’t know what the "causative agent” was behind the woman’s Oct 2 death, which unconfirmed reports in Russia blamed on pneumonic plague - a less common but severe form of plague that can spread from person to person.

In its tersely worded statements, Russia's public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, does not link the case to pneumonic plague, saying only that the lab worker had contracted pneumonia of "unknown” origin and that "extensive” testing found no evidence her illness was caused by any of the pathogens she worked with at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East.

"We don’t understand how she was infected,” Van Kerkhove said. "We need information in a timely way. We need regular information. We need answers to the follow-up of the questions that we have asked.” "We have posed these questions to our colleagues in the Russian Federation. In fairness, they have responded. We’ve gone back with more questions,” she said.

The comments suggested the UN health agency has more questions than answers about the situation at the lab, which focuses on plague and was founded about a century ago to study the disease in Siberia, where it occurs naturally in wild animals. Russian authorities have kept a tight lid on information about the case, which has been surrounded by secrecy.

While it has raised global concerns, Russian state TV and other national state-controlled media have largely steered clear of the subject. Some news outlets withdrew earlier reports about the case. Rospotrebnadzor said Sunday the lab worker was diagnosed with "pneumonia of unknown etiology,” meaning its origin was not known.

A state TV station in Irkutsk reported she died Oct 2 in a hospital in Shelekhov, a town just outside Irkutsk. Officials have quarantined that hospital and were monitoring the worker's contacts. Russia has said the pneumonia initially presented as a "typical” acute respiratory viral infection, the WHO has said, acknowledging that pneumonia is commonplace.