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On the evening of Friday 2 October, Daria Shipilova, an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, died in a district hospital in the Russian city of Shelekhov. Her place of work, and the rumoured circumstances of her death, have triggered a public health emergency in the region and a slew of questions: did the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, kill Shipilova? Could this metastasise into a plague epidemic in Russia? Should we – abroad – be worried? The Russian authorities have done their best to play down the link between the plague and Shipilova’s death. According to Russia’s public health watchdog,...

On Monday, President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that the United States will help Russia after a laboratory worker died at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia.While local media alleged the 28-year-old lab technician died from pneumonic plague, Russian officials stated postmortem tests found only 'pneumonia of undetermined aetiology' with no evidence of occupational pathogens.Authorities placed at least one hospital in Shelekhov under quarantine, with nearly 200 people under medical observation after potential exposure to the worker.U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the nation is monitoring closely and sees no 'cause for alarm,' while experts...

Hundreds of people are currently under medical observation after a laboratory worker died from an "unspecified form of plague" in Russia. Health authorities in Siberia’s Irkutsk region said nearly 200 people are under medical observation, according to media reports and a statement by a regional leader on Friday. The Moscow Times said that Alexei Tsydenov, head of the neighbouring republic of Buryatia, confirmed that the woman had died from an unspecified form of plague. Tsydenov, however, said “there are no plague outbreaks in the republic, including in areas bordering Mongolia”. Russian media outlets have identified the woman as Daria Sh.,...

The White House is monitoring a plague outbreak in Russia after a lab technician died and hundreds of people she came into contact with were placed in quarantine. An official with the Trump administration told Axios on Sunday that the administration is 'aware, monitoring the outbreak, and assessing options.' Darya Shipilova, 28, was reportedly working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia when she was exposed to pneumonic plague

Whenever I watch a movie where people wear suits to enter a biohazard facility, my first thought is, "Are you CRAZY?!" The answer is obviously yes, yes, they are. While everybody is fretting about whether expensive computer programs are planning to kill us all, real people are messing around with dangerous bugs that really could kill quite a few of us. Ask Dr. Fauci about that. He'll trot out the Fifth Amendment, of course, but you get the idea. Just kidding. Sort of. Well, it appears to have happened again, this time in Russia, and I am just waiting to...

In the Irkutsk Oblast of Russia, the aggressor country, a death from pneumonic plague—a dangerous airborne infection with a high fatality rate—has been reported. An employee of a local anti-plague institute died from the disease. This is according to reports in the Russian media, Ukrainian News Agency reports. The “People of Lake Baikal” project reported that 28-year-old Daria Shipilova died at a hospital in the city of Shelekhov. A week earlier, she had broken a test tube containing the pathogen responsible for pneumonic plague. Shipilova worked as a lab technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute. It is reported that the...

The Black Death: A Global History. By Thomas Asbridge. Random House; 544 pages; $38. Allen Lane; 560 pagesThe disease seems to have emerged in Asia. It soon reached Europe, ravaging Italy first. It killed millions, often quickly. Many people perished at home, or died within a few hours or days of receiving medical treatment. So large was the death toll and so great was the danger of contagion that funerary customs were disrupted. People fled cities. All this was true of covid-19. It was also true of the Black Death. As Thomas Asbridge describes in detail, the medieval plague was...

According to a statement released by the University of South Florida, a mass grave containing the remains of victims of the Plague of Justinian (A.D. 541–750) has been identified at the site of Jerash in northern Jordan by a team of researchers led by Rays H.Y. Jiang of the University of South Florida. Hundreds of people were buried within several days in this mass grave dug in the city's hippodrome. "By linking biological evidence from the bodies to the archaeological setting, we can see how disease affected real people within their social and environmental context," Jiang said. Examination of the...

According to a statement released by Antiquity, analysis of skeletal remains recovered from a seventeenth-century hospital cemetery in Basel, Switzerland, suggests that young laborers were the people most likely to die during an outbreak of plague. As a trade center that drew people in from abroad, the city of Basel was vulnerable to the spread of Yersinia pestis bacteria and outbreaks of plague. The last recorded outbreak of the disease in Basel occurred between 1665 and 1670. Researchers led by osteoarchaeologist Laura Rindlisbacher of the University of Basel examined skeletal remains recovered from the hospital cemetery dated to this period,...

One of humanity’s oldest and deadliest killers is staging a modern-day comeback. The so-called “white plague” reclaimed its title as the world’s deadliest infectious disease in 2023 after being briefly overtaken by COVID-19 during the first three years of the pandemic. And the US isn’t immune. While the country still has one of the lowest rates globally, cases have been climbing steadily since 2020 — reversing three decades of decline. Just this week, in fact, the man accused of murdering 18-year-old Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman failed to show up for a detention hearing because he’s being treated for tuberculosis....

The infamous Black Death -- a pandemic that killed as many as one third to one half of Europeans within just a few years -- may have been aided in its devastation by an unknown volcanic eruption.That's the hypothesis presented in research published December 4 in Communications Earth & Environment, which argues that the eruption triggered several seasons of climate instability and crop failures. That instability, in turn, forced several Italian states to import grain stores from new sources -- specifically, from regions surrounding the Black Sea. Riding along on those grain stores, the researchers posit, were fleas infected with...

At least three cases of the plague have been reported in the United States, with infections confirmed in New Mexico, California, and Arizona. Infectious disease specialists noted that a handful of plague cases are diagnosed each year. The bacterium responsible, Yersinia pestis, is transmitted by fleas and cycles naturally among rodents. At least three cases of the plague have been reported in the United States, with infections confirmed in New Mexico, California, and Arizona. (WKRC, file, Provided) "If a person is around these rodents where the fleas are, the fleas can jump off the rodents, get on the person, and...

Officials believe an infected flea bit the sick person, who was camping in the South Lake Tahoe area.Health officials in California identified a positive case of plague in a Lake Tahoe resident. El Dorado County officials said in a release that they have notified the California Department of Health that a resident from South Lake Tahoe has plague. The person is recovering at home and is receiving medical care, the El Dorado County release said. No other information about the person or the person's condition was released. Officials believe an infected flea bit the sick person, who was camping in...

Health officials in California identified a positive case of plague in a Lake Tahoe resident. El Dorado County officials said in a release that they have notified the California Department of Health that a resident from South Lake Tahoe has plague. Officials believe an infected flea bit the sick person, who was camping in the South Lake Tahoe area, the release said. Officials are investigating.

Saturday, November 2, 2002 ©2002 Associated Press URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2002/11/02/international1651EST0195.DTL (11-02) 13:51 PST JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- A California doctor who committed suicide after being accused in a murder plot gave deadly germs to apartheid South Africa's secret chemical and biological weapons program, CBS' "60 Minutes" reported Sunday. Larry C. Ford met with scientists from South Africa's Project Coast in the 1980s to discuss chemical and biological warfare, Wouter Basson, who headed the project, told the program. He also passed a bag filled with cholera, typhoid, botulism, anthrax and bubonic plague to a South African military doctor during a meeting...

Frank Herbert thought so. He wrote the "Dune" books; he wrote about blowback from the Irish "troubles" in which a virology scientist, engineers a disease that kills all women, of all races. The books is called White Plague. Current bio-warfare policy is not to wipe out tens of millions of people, notwithstanding the Spanish flu (accidental) and Dr. Ralph Baric's insertion of the furin clevage site into the Sars Covid 2008 that formerly could not surpass the blood-brain barrier until deliberately engineered (non-accidental). Current bio-warfare policy is toward high-infectious, low-lethality organisms, to cause economic injury to countries like China and...

More than six months after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, as scientific understanding of the novel coronavirus continues to evolve, one question remains decidedly unanswered. How will this pandemic come to an end? Current scientific understanding is that only a vaccine will put an end to this pandemic, but how we get there remains to be seen. It seems safe to say, however, that some day, somehow, it will end. After all, other viral pandemics have. Take, for example, the flu pandemic of 1918-1919.

If you’re ever despairing about the state of the world, you can — at least, according to some scholars — be thankful it’s not the year 536 CE. To be fair, it’s medieval scholars, not 21st-century ones, who called 536 CE the worst year to be alive. But hear them out, because it sounds pretty bad. That year, a massive volcano erupted, historians believe, filling the air with volcanic ash. Of course, the majority of people affected by the disaster had no idea what was happening — they just knew it was very suddenly very dark for a very long...

The Pueblo Department of Public Health and Environment (PDPHE), in conjunction with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), is currently investigating a human case of plague based on preliminary test results. The plague bacterium, known as Yersinia pestis, can be transmitted by fleas and wild rodents, such as prairie dogs, squirrels, rats, and rabbits. According to the CDC, “Humans usually become infected through the bite of an infected rodent flea or by handling an infected animal. Plague can be cured with antibiotics, but these must be given promptly to prevent serious illness or death.” Symptoms of plague...

Chicago health officials have announced that a "small number" of tuberculosis (TB) cases have been reported at some migrant facilities following a recent outbreak of measles among migrants living in the Windy City's shelters. The Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) said the TB cases were reported in "a few different shelters" in the city. However, officials did not disclose the exact number of confirmed cases or which shelter locations they originated from, Fox 32 Chicago reports.