U.S. officials monitoring Russian plague situation, Trump hints at possible U.S. aid
by Tom Howell Jr. · The Washington TimesU.S. government officials said Monday that they are monitoring a suspected plague case and quarantines in eastern Russia, and President Trump said America would be willing to help if the Kremlin requests it.
“We’re looking at it very strongly. We just heard about it,” Mr. Trump told White House reporters.
“It’s a big problem for Russia,” he said. “I hate to see them having it.”
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The president said microbes can be “like an army,” making it hard to control the spread of disease. He said the U.S. would help any country dealing with the disease, but he has not spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the situation.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday the U.S. government is “keeping an eye on” the situation and confirmed that a Russian lab worker was infected and there is concern about local spread. Travel between the U.S. and Russia is limited, he said.
“We’re watching and monitoring it closely,” Mr. Rubio told reporters. “I don’t think it’s cause for alarm, but it is cause for focus and a cause to just keep an eye on it, and we’re doing that.”
Russian news reports said 189 people have been placed under medical supervision in the Irkutsk region of Siberia after the worker, a woman in her 20s, died from an unspecified form of plague.
An employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, the woman had recently returned from a work trip near the Mongolia border, where she may have been exposed to the disease.
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Her ties to the research lab sparked unsubstantiated suspicions that a work incident led to the spread of the disease — akin to theories about the outbreak of COVID-19 in late 2019.
Russia’s health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, said the woman had been “diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown etiology.”
Plague, often spread by rodents and their fleas, is a bacterial disease commonly associated with mass deaths in the Middle Ages.
It is treatable if caught early and takes various forms, such as bubonic infections through the skin and into lymph nodes, septicemic infections in the bloodstream and tissue, and pneumonic forms that enter the lungs.
The situation is unnerving in a world scarred by the COVID-19 pandemic that began with local cases in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, before sweeping the globe.
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U.S. officials and global health authorities criticized the Chinese government for not being more forthcoming in the early days of the outbreak or providing more details about a possible link to a viral-research lab in Wuhan.
Russian authorities said the situation is “stable.”
“A special set of measures has been organized and implemented in response to the case of an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East who has been diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown etiology,” the Rospotrebnadzor health agency said in a statement on Sunday.
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