A top official with the World Health Organisation said Wednesday (October 7, 2026) the UN health agency doesn’t know how a lab worker in Siberia died amid concerns about plague, and she urged Russia to provide more information.
The comments suggested the UN health agency has more questions than answers about the situation at the lab, which focuses on plague and was founded about a century ago to study the disease in a region where it is endemic.
In its tersely worded statements, Russia’s public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, does not link the case to pneumonic plague, saying only that “extensive” testing found no evidence the lab worker’s illness was caused by any of the pathogens she worked with at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East. Russia has said she died of pneumonia — a “typical” acute respiratory viral infection — and its health authorities have found no cases of plague recently, WHO has said, acknowledging that pneumonia is commonplace.
