Darya Shipilova is said to have been exposed to the pathogen while working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia
Hundreds of people have been placed into quarantine in Siberia after a laboratory worker died of suspected plague, according to reports.
Darya Shipilova, an employee at the Anti-Plague Research Institute in Shelekhov, was exposed to the bacteria after she accidentally broke a test tube containing the pathogen while she was collecting samples, the Kyiv Independent reported.
She was hospitalised on 29 September with severe pneumonia of "unknown origin” and placed on a ventilator, but died shortly after.
Independent Russian outlet Lyudi Baikal reported that several hospitals in the city of Irkutsk had closed for a three-week quarantine.
Wow. What’s Putin doing, manufacturing plague to deal with Ukraine?
Always has been.
The USSR from the Stalin era onwards had world-leading biological and chemical weapons programmes, largely due to having plenty of test subjects in the gulag system.
There are very legitimate reasons to be doing research like this. Every developed nation pretty much has labs like this.
However, that isn’t to say none of these are attempting to make weapons. The issue is research for a weapon like this looks pretty much identical to the good kind of research. The only way to know the difference would be getting your hands on documents saying it’s for a weapon.
Sure, but, Putin.
what kind of scientist accidently breaks open a test tube containing plague
Never underestimate the human capacity for failure.
I’ve lost count of the glassware I’ve broken. Now none of them were plague cultures, but I wouldn’t get less clumsy just because they were.
Also this sort of thing becomes more likely when we’re overworked and tired. So if you don’t want another plague, it might be a good idea to make sure your local scientists have reasonable workloads.
There are a lot of labs who work on all kinds of diseases. They keep them in test tubes sometimes. Accidents happen. The big issue is there should be protocols that prevent that accident from spreading, which there apparently weren’t in this case. This could be for a ton of reasons, like the person not following protocol, or issues caused by a lack of funding due to the war. I don’t think we can really speculate on why this happened, just that it did, and the fact that they were doing this work isn’t that strange.