Seems odd that something like this is not getting more coverage, but there are news reports from a couple days ago indicating that a 28 year old lab worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia has died from pneumonic plague and 189 of her co-workers are now in isolation and under observation, while the institution has been quarantined. The reporting is somewhat mixed as to how she became infected: whether it was from breaking a test tube (which seems the preferred narrative) but also that she was infected on a work trip to Buryatia, where a plague outbreak was reported on the border with Mongolia. Here are some of the news articles:
- "Suspected Plague Death at Russian Lab Sparks ‘Anti-Epidemic’ Lockdown"--Newsweek.
- "Russia: 189 people under observation after lab worker dies of possible pneumonic plague"--Outbreak News Today.
- "Pneumonic plague outbreak hits Siberia as lab worker, 28, dies after breaking test tube and 200 people she was in contact with are put in quarantine"--Daily Mail.
I've written about the plague before and here are a couple posts which provide some background on the black death of the 14th Century:
But here are few key points:
First, the plague of the 14th Century was much more easily transmitted and far more deadly than the modern strains that you hear about. Accounts from the period describe people becoming infected and dying with hours or days of first showing symptoms. Based on several factors, it is believed that the most virulent strain in the 14th Century was pneumonic plague, which was spread through the air and infected through the upper respiratory system rather than by tick bites as is more commonly taught in school or history books.
Second, some scientists--particularly Russian scientists--believe that the 14th Century plague was a different strain unique to the marmot plague reservoir of Central Asia/Western China.
Third, Orent discusses in her book that the Russians had worked on weaponizing the plague, trying to recreate the extremely deadly version that arose in the 14th Century.
Related:
- "40 al-Qaeda terrorists dead after failed experiment with plague weapon"--Homeland Security News Wire (2009). From that article:
Peter Goodspeed writes in the National Post that the very day Barack Obama was sworn in as president, warning Americans “our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred,” there were reports an al-Qaeda affiliate recently abandoned a training camp in Algeria after forty terrorists died from being exposed to the plague during a biological weapons test. The report, which first surfaced in the British tabloid The Sun, says members of al-Qaeda in the Land of the Maghreb (AQLIM) hurriedly abandoned their cave hideouts in Tizi Ouzou province, 150 kilometres east of the Algerian capital Algiers, after being exposed to plague bacteria.
The newspaper said they apparently became infected while experimenting with biological weapons. Algerian security forces discovered the body of a dead terrorist alongside a road near the abandoned hideout.
U.S. intelligence officials, speaking anonymously with Eli Lake of the Washington Times on Tuesday, could only confirm the sudden base closure after an unconventional weapons test went wrong. The officials said they intercepted an urgent communication in early January between the AQLIM leadership and al-Qaeda’s top leaders in the tribal region of Pakistan. The Algerian terrorists said they were abandoning and sealing off a training area after a leak of a chemical or biological substance.
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