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.
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.