The Guardian, Mon 5 Oct 2026, Pjotr Sauer and Luke Harding
Quarantine measures in place in several hospitals in eastern Russia amid uncertainty over death of Darya Shipilova
Darya
Shipilova died on the night of 2 October at a regional hospital in
Shelekhov.
Photograph: Social Media
The US
secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said the US is closely monitoring the case
of a Russian laboratory worker who died last week after a reported accident at
a plague research institute in Siberia.
“We’re
watching and monitoring it closely,” Rubio said on Monday before leaving for a
trip to Europe. “I don’t think it’s cause for
alarm, but it is cause for focus and a cause just to keep an eye on it.”
Darya
Shipilova, a 28-year-old employee at the anti-plague institute in the city of
Irkutsk, became ill at work. She died two days later on the night of 2 October
at a regional hospital in the nearby town of Shelekhov.
It remains
unclear how she became unwell. Unconfirmed reports in Russian media have
suggested Shipilova may have been infected after a mishap at the laboratory.
Officials have not publicly confirmed that account.
Local media
have reported that the institute has subsequently been locked down, with staff
forced to sleep on the floor and on chairs. “They’ve been isolating everybody
since Friday – more than 60 people,” one relative, Roman, told the news portal Siberia.Realities.
He said
family members were allowed to drop off food at a checkpoint while tests were
carried out inside the building. Similar quarantine restrictions have been
placed on several other hospitals in and around the city.
Rubio,
citing what Russians have released about the death, said it seemed a worker in
the lab became infected and there was concern the disease may have spread
internally.
“There’s
very limited travel between the US and Russia, obviously,” he said. “But like
anything else, something like that gets out, it just quickly spreads.”
Senior
Russian officials have added to public disquiet by sending conflicting
messages. Alexey Tsydenov, the head of the Buryatia region, which neighbours
Irkutsk, initially wrote that Shipilova had died of plague, before editing his
post to say she had “possibly” died of the disease.
Rospotrebnadzor,
Russia’s health watchdog, said Shipilova died from “pneumonia of unknown aetiology”. It insisted that tests found no micro-organisms linked to her
professional work and described the “sanitary and epidemiological” situation in
the area as stable.
Authorities
in the nearby city of Baikalsk briefly urged residents to avoid travelling to
Shelekhov and surrounding settlements after what they said was unofficial
information about a possible plague infection. They later deleted the post from
social media.
“There are
no obvious changes to daily life on the streets, but people are worried and
anxious. Locals are angry that they are not being told anything,” said Elena
Trifonova, a journalist with People of Baikal, an exiled Russian media outlet
specialising in Siberia.
Despite the
lack of a confirmed diagnosis, precautionary measures appear to have been
introduced across the region. The US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
reported on Monday that several hospitals in Irkutsk had been placed under
quarantine.
The outlet
confirmed that staff from Shipilova’s workplace, the Irkutsk Anti-plague
Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, had been kept inside the
institute since 2 October.
Patients at
Irkutsk city clinical hospital No 1 and the Ivano-Matreninskaya children’s
hospital said relatives were not being allowed to visit and people inside were
not permitted to leave.
On social
media, local residents described some of the precautions being introduced.
Ulyana
Gavryunina, who went on Monday to one of Irkutsk’s main maternity hospitals for
a routine check-up on Monday, said doctors refused to allow her mother in,
citing a quarantine imposed over the suspected plague case. Gavryunina said
staff member checked her for flu-like symptoms and asked her to fill out a
screening form for infections, on which “plague” was listed. She posted a
photograph of the form on Instagram.
Elsewhere,
a mask requirement was introduced at the Irkutsk aluminium smelter in
Shelekhov. The plant’s director, Artyom Fominykh, called it a preventive measure, saying: “Better safe than sorry.” Over the weekend several public
events in Irkutsk were cancelled.
Shipolova’s
death has prompted intervention from senior federal health officials. Anna
Popova, the head of Rospotrebnadzor and the country’s chief sanitary doctor,
travelled to Irkutsk on Friday.
She
attended an emergency meeting of the regional sanitary and anti-epidemic
commission over what officials called a suspected case of a “particularly
dangerous infection”.
Igor
Kobzev, the governor of the Irkutsk region, urged residents to remain calm
after meeting Popova to coordinate the response. “All identified contacts have
been placed under medical observation. As of today, none is showing signs of
illness and laboratory tests have returned negative results,” he wrote on
Telegram.
Kobzev made
no reference to reports that a laboratory worker had died.
US
politicians have raised concerns about the incident, which follows longstanding
and unfounded allegations by the Kremlin that Ukraine has secretly carried out
biological weapons research with the support of Washington.
A
Republican representative, Don Bacon, a senior member of the House armed
services committee, wrote on social media: “I remember hearing from
anti-Ukraine voices about their so-called bio labs. It was Russian
disinformation ops at their best. But in reality it is Russia with the bio
labs.”
Plague
remains endemic in parts of Siberia and the Russian far east, where the
bacterium persists naturally among wild rodents and their fleas.
But human
cases in Russia are rare. Before the suspected Irkutsk case, the country’s last
recorded human infection was in 2016, when a 10-year-old boy in Siberia’s Altai
Republic contracted plague after helping butcher a marmot.
“This case
here seems like a rare lab accident and is unlikely to go much further,” Prof
Ian Jones, a professor of virology at the University of Reading, in the UK,
said. “Although it is true that pneumonic plague is directly transmissible, the
contacts of the primary case are known and can be treated if they show any sign
of infection.”
He added:
“Plague carries a huge history and is still present in many parts of the world,
including Russia, but the living conditions associated with previously spread
plague are no longer generally true, antibiotics are available and its
potential is therefore limited.”
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