Emergency quarantine protocols are in place in Irkutsk after a suspected laboratory accident
Russian health authorities have reportedly placed hundreds of people in quarantine in Siberia following the death of a laboratory worker who was exposed to an “unknown” virus.
The 28-year-old victim was an employee at the Anti-Plague Research Institute in Shelekhov, a town near the regional capital of Irkutsk, according to reports.
Prior to her death, she reportedly told medical personnel that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live biological samples while working inside the facility.
Wikipedia is already referencing articles saying it’s a pathogen related to the Black Death.
And for people worried about it, the World Health Organization (WHO) says that “today it can be easily treated with antibiotics and the use of standard preventative measures.”
such fun times to be without spleen
So if it’s easily treated, and I’m sure they knew this at the lab, why did the worker die?
In a country where people suicide by 12 knife stabs in the back and where people randomly fall from an inoperable 5th floor window…
I would just say: because Russia?
Many possible explanations.
Let’s not discount the possibility of creaking Soviet-era equipment that should have been replaced decades ago but the money was non-existent/spent corruptly/not enough to touch the sides of the neglect/delete as appropriate.
We’re talking about the country which operates the poor Kuznetsov which has been begging for death for many years.
Nah, they made their own equipment. That’s worse.
People die of treatable diseases.
that kinda undercuts the whole “don’t worry, the black death can be cured now a days” argument
Assuming of course, to be pessimistic, it hasn’t been weaponized. Siberian Anti-Plague Research facility doesn’t fill me with confidence, and you’d expect the hospital to have tried antibiotics, granted they may have been too late or used the wrong ones.
My ‘favourite’ fact about Soviet-era bioweapons is that they had a facility on an island in the Aral Sea. Said sea vanished from existence after the Kremlin redirected all the rivers which fed it in an effort to grow cotton in the desert, causing it to shrink to some 10% or less of its original volume. As well as destroying the livelihoods of the fishermen of Aralsk in Kazakhstan, it also made the island full of fucking anthrax among other things part of the mainland.
I’ll say this for the Soviets, they didn’t do environmental disasters by halves. Also as a Briton we had our own anthrax island in Scotland from the war that was only decontaminated in the '90s.
Why is this comment buried here? It’s literally the solution! Do people love the thrill of panicking? Internet, you so silly sometimes…
Chat how easy it is to brew an antibiotic resistant strain of plague considered we created some resistant diseases fully by accident?
renowned current health guidance has a high likelihood of failing to apply to new genetically-modified variants
(if that is the case)