WHO Says It Cannot Fully Assess Siberian Lab Death Without More From Russia

The World Health Organization cannot carry out a full risk assessment of the death of a laboratory worker at a plague research institute in Siberia because Russia has not yet given it a complete account of what happened, the agency said Wednesday, according to Agence France-Presse.

The 28-year-old woman worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute and died early this month after a short illness. Early Russian media reports, some of them quickly removed, suggested she had contracted pneumonic plague after an accident in the lab. Russian health authorities have said only that she died of pneumonia of unknown cause, that testing found no link to the pathogens she handled, and that no accident was detected at the institute.

The WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told reporters in Geneva that the agency did not yet have the full picture of the event, Agence France-Presse reported. He said timely and transparent information sharing under international health rules was needed to sort out conflicting reports. Tedros also said the agency had asked Moscow to respond to media reports of a second institute employee with pneumonia of undetermined cause. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s director of epidemic and pandemic management, said the agency still did not know what infected the worker or how.

The Kremlin pushed back. Its spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said most of what the media was reporting about the case was false and that official information would come from Rospotrebnadzor, the national health watchdog, Al Jazeera and ABC News reported. The watchdog said, according to ABC News, that the situation in the region was calm, that there was no epidemic risk and that it had sent details to the WHO.

Washington has pressed Moscow as well. The State Department delivered a formal diplomatic complaint urging greater transparency, ABC News reported, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that Russia should share more information. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the United States did not believe the death was tied to a biological weapon, while acknowledging that Russia was not sharing much. He said he expected to speak with President Vladimir Putin; the Kremlin said no call had been scheduled but that one could be arranged quickly, CBS News reported.

Federal health officials describe the risk to Americans as extremely low. About 200 people a year travel to the United States from the region, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is screening arrivals at designated airports.

Russia’s strongest argument is its own testing. Rospotrebnadzor said, CBS News reported, that about 200 people who had contact with the worker were screened without any plague cases found, that she had been vaccinated against the infections she studied, and that most quarantine measures were being eased. That may prove correct, but the WHO says it cannot confirm the assessment independently until Moscow answers its questions.