Trump plans Putin call over disputed reports of plague death in Siberia

Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would speak “very soon” with Vladimir Putin about the reported death of a laboratory worker in Siberia, as the United States and the World Health Organization pressed Russia to provide clearer information. The case concerns a 28-year-old woman, identified by Russian media as Darya Shipilova, who worked at an anti-plague institute in the Irkutsk region. Reports said she may have contracted pneumonic plague after a test tube broke, and one outlet reported that as many as 200 people who may have had contact with her were quarantined.

Those accounts have not been confirmed by Russian authorities. The country’s health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, said a document circulating online about special anti-plague measures did not come from official sources and was false. Russian officials also said postmortem tests had not detected plague.

Irkutsk Governor Igor Kobzev said an inspection found that the woman had died of pneumonia, although the precise cause remained undetermined. He said no microorganisms connected to her professional work had been found in her biological samples and that no other institute workers had sought medical attention since her death. The WHO said an update from Russia stated that no case of plague had been recorded in Irkutsk.

It also said Russia had begun an epidemiological investigation into a case of community-acquired pneumonia, identified contacts and arranged monitoring and laboratory testing. According to the WHO, tests found no dangerous infectious-disease pathogens among those contacts. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for timely, complete and transparent information-sharing under international health regulations so that conflicting accounts could be assessed.

WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said the risk to Irkutsk appeared moderate to low based on the information available, while the agency continued to monitor the situation. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged Moscow to be open about the incident, saying Washington needed more information to determine how it should respond. The Wall Street Journal reported that the State Department had sent Russia a confidential diplomatic warning, known as a demarche, over disclosure obligations.

Trump said he had a call scheduled with Putin, rather than saying that the two leaders had already spoken. The reports do not confirm that plague caused the death or that an outbreak occurred. Pneumonic plague can spread through respiratory transmission and can be fatal without early treatment, but the available official information does not establish such transmission in this case.