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, Rospotrebnadzor, Shipilova had been diagnosed with pneumonia of ‘unknown etiology’ – i.e. of unknown origin. Irkutsk’s regional governor, Igor Kobzev, announced that a ‘particularly dangerous infection’ had been identified, without specifying a particular diagnosis. Later, Kobzev took to social media to insist that the situation in the region was ‘stable’ and that approximately 200 people who had recently interacted with Shipilova had been tracked down and were being monitored. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many questions remain unanswered about what killed Shipilova

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many questions remain unanswered about what killed Shipilova

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the authorities’ vague pronouncements on the........

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