Free Republic

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...

U.S. officials are tracking a possible plague case in Russia, they confirmed on Oct. 5. “CDC is monitoring the situation closely with the State Department and our other interagency partners,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Epoch Times in an email. “The safety and security of U.S. citizens is our highest priority,” the spokesperson added. Russia’s consumer protection agency Rospotrebnadzor reported over the weekend that a worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East in southeastern Siberia was...

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...

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

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...

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.,...

A longstanding archaeological mystery has loomed over discoveries at ancient burial sites in eastern Siberia: why were so many children and adolescents among the dead?Now, according to a recent study in the journal Nature, DNA recovered from human remains found in burial sites at four cemeteries near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia may finally reveal the answer.Thousands of years ago, prior to the rise of ancient medieval cities -- and their often-rat-infested streets -- a disease famously associated with these rodents had already ravaged communities of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.The research, based on reconstructions of ancient bacterial genomes preserved in the teeth...

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,...

Paleoanthropologists from the University of Vienna and Harvard University have analyzed ancient DNA from 435 individuals from Eurasian archaeological sites... They've discovered a previously unknown group, called Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) people, and found out that this population can be connected to all Indo-European-speaking populations.Indo-European languages, which number over 400 and include major groups such as Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Celtic, are spoken by nearly half the world's population today...These migrations out of the steppes had the largest effect on European human genomes of any demographic event in the last 5,000 years and are widely regarded as the probable vector...

An international team of researchers has found the DNA of Y. pestis in a 4,000-year-old domesticated sheep from the fortified Bronze Age settlement of Arkaim, in the southern Ural Mountains in present-day Russia, which marks the first confirmed case of a Bronze Age plague infection in a non-human host. It proves that livestock played a role in prehistoric plague dynamics.The sheep was associated with the Sintashta-Petrovka cultural complex, which was known for its sophisticated metallurgy, horse riding, and large, mobile herds. Genetic studies indicate that the bacterium found in the sheep belongs to the Late Neolithic–Bronze Age plague lineage that...

According to a statement released by the University of Vienna, a team of scientists from the University of Vienna, the University of Tartu, Cambridge University, and University College London have reconstructed the genomes of human betaherpesvirus 6A and 6B (HHV-6A/B) from samples taken from human remains recovered from archaeological sites in Europe. Today, HHV-6B infects about 90 percent of children by age two, causing roseola infantum, also known as "sixth disease, " an illness characterized by a rash and a fever. In addition to causing illness, these viruses are capable of integrating into human chromosomes and remaining dormant. Such inherited...

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...

A study published in Nature Communications in May 2023 saw researchers reexamine bones from the Levens Park Ring Cairn. It was revealed that one of the four people buried within the cairn had been infected with the plague -- the earliest known instance in Britain (circa 2000 BC). Uncovering Britain's DEADLY Prehistoric Plague - New Evidence | 14:51 Adam Morgan Ibbotson | 21.6K subscribers | 80,717 views | May 6, 2024

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...

The unidentified patient, from Coconino County, showed up to the Flagstaff Medical Center Emergency Department and died there the same day, Northern Arizona Healthcare said in a statement. It is unclear when the death occurred. The hospital noted that "appropriate initial management" and "attempts to provide life-saving resuscitation" was performed, but "the patient did not recover." Rapid diagnostic testing led to a presumptive diagnosis of Yersinia pestis. Coconino County Health and Human Services said testing results confirmed Friday that the patient died from pneumonic plague, described as “a severe lung infection caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium.” This marked the...

...there are still many in academia who claim that changes to the climate and the outbreak of plague were catastrophic for the eastern Roman Empire... Our findings reveal that there was no decline in the 6th century, but rather a new record in population and trade in the eastern Mediterranean...Previous research claimed that this site declined in the middle of the 6th century... The decline only started in the 7th century.Large-scale data included new databases compiled using archaeological survey, excavation and shipwreck finds. The survey and excavation databases, which were made up of tens of thousands of sites, were used...

French police are investigating a suspicious letter addressed to the interior minister that tested positive for the plague. Discovered at a mail-sorting centre near Dijon, the letter was addressed to the town hall of Roubaix, in the north of France outside Lille, for the attention of Gérald Darmanin, the minister of the interior. Police were called when the unstamped envelope, with undisclosed “inscriptions” on its back, roused suspicions among workers. Inside, they discovered a black powder and a letter containing racist insults.

Sworn to secrecy by the Japanese Imperial Army, Hideo Shimizu carried the horrors he saw at the notorious Unit 731 facility with him for more than 70 years. The 93-year-old was just 14 when he was drafted as a cadet to the city of Harbin, in what was then Japanese-occupied Manchuria, during World WaR 2. There, he was groomed to take part in some of history's worst atrocities - human experiments carried out on prisoners of war including pregnant women and small children. More than 3,000 people - mostly Chinese civilians, but also Russian, British and American POWs - were...

A New Mexico man has died of complications from the bubonic plague as state health officials scramble to assess the ongoing risk in the region. The unidentified Lincoln Country resident had been hospitalized recently with the bacterial affliction, although the details surrounding how he contracted it and how his health deteriorated remain unclear, the state Department of Health (NMDOH) announced Friday. Despite medics’ best efforts, the patient succumbed to his symptoms, marking New Mexico’s first recorded case of bubonic plague since 2021. This was also the state’s first BP-related fatality since 2020; the state recorded four cases of the disease...