Trump to raise Russian lab worker's death with Putin

State Department urges Americans to leave Russia immediately

President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would raise the death of a 28-year-old Siberian anti-plague lab worker with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a call “very soon.” The State Department reiterated its call for Americans to leave Russia immediately, and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued a health alert for the Irkutsk region, more than 3,000 miles east of the capital.

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Tuesday evening, Trump said he had “a call scheduled very soon” with Putin and was being kept updated by U.S. intelligence agencies.

“So far we are in very deep discussions,” Trump said. “We will be able to report about it probably tomorrow.”

The case involves the death Friday of Daria Shipilova, 28, an employee of a remote Siberian anti-plague research lab. Russian authorities have publicly described her cause of death only as “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” a formulation that has sparked speculation that she may have contracted the bacterium that causes pneumonic plague, a deadly bacterial lung infection.

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow said in its Tuesday health alert for the Irkutsk region that the U.S. mission was tracking reports of “associated quarantine measures in, and closures of, hospitals in Irkutsk.” The alert warned of limited ability to assist U.S. citizens in the area and noted extra restrictions on movement within Russia imposed on U.S. government personnel.

The UPI report said Shipilova’s exposure may have resulted from her accidentally breaking a test tube containing the micro-organism she worked with. Russian authorities have not given an official cause of death, but say testing of all her contacts for pneumonic plague has come back negative. They deny any mishap occurred at the lab and describe the “sanitary and epidemiological situation” as “stable.”

Plague is endemic to rodents and the fleas that infest them across Africa, Asia and much of the Americas, and is transmissible between humans through droplets in breath or from infected tissue, according to standard public-health descriptions.

Kevin Esvelt, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, publicly questioned whether the pathogen in question was actually plague or something more sinister. “The evidence supports a tragic exposure to a lethal, presumably transmissible pathogen that Russia appears reluctant to publicly identify,” Esvelt wrote in an online post. “Physical lockdown indicates it cannot be controlled with prophylactic antibiotics, implying engineered pan-resistance or that it isn’t plague at all.”

Esvelt’s reading is one expert’s interpretation drawn from public statements by Russian and U.S. officials; it is not a confirmed identification of the pathogen. The Russian government has not publicly identified the specific micro-organism involved in Shipilova’s death.