The Current - How worried should you be about the plague?

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

A possible plague-related death in Russia has prompted officials to place hundreds of people under medical observation and multiple health care facilities under quarantine. Local reports suggest a worker at an anti-plague research facility died late last week coming into contact with the pneumonic plague pathogen from a test tube at the lab, but the cause of death has not been confirmed by Russian authorities. The story has sparked international concern about how these deadly diseases are handled at research facilities and whether or not this could be the start of a bigger outbreak. 

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. There are growing calls for Russia to share more information after a 28-year-old woman who worked as Siberian Plague Research Lab died last week. Russian authorities haven't said a whole lot about this, only that she died from a pneumonia of undetermined origin. There are reports that officials have put the facility where she was treated under quarantine and that nearly 200 people who'd been in contact with her are under medical observation.

The World Health Organization says the public health risk appears to be low. A lot is unknown about this case. But it is raising questions about how labs around the world keep deadly pathogens secure. Gregory Koblenz is director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University in Virginia, also co-director of the Global Biolabs Initiative, which tracks high containment labs and bio-risk management policies around the world. Greg, good morning. Good morning.

How are you? I'm well, thanks. plague, that doesn't sound good. How concerned should people be about this? Well, at this point, we shouldn't be that concerned since this is a report of just one case in Siberia, so that is geographically very remote, and we don't have indications yet of the disease spreading beyond the reported case. So if the information being provided by Russia is accurate, which there need to be big question marks about, at this point, this is relatively low-risk incident. What kind of plague are we talking about here? So some of the reports say that the

patient died of pneumonic plague, which is one of three types of this disease, and this is the most severe type because it means that plague bacteria have gotten into the person's lungs, and this then is much more severe and more likely be a fatal infection, and then very worryingly, is also is what enables that person to spread the disease to other people because it's in the lungs and they can cough out plague bacteria as they're ill. So it's concerning for both the severity of it and the ability of it to be transmitted from person to person. Plague is one of those words, as I said at the beginning,

that kind of chills people in some ways. We heard yesterday from the Public Health Agency of Canada saying that human cases of plague are very rare in this country. the last case reported was in 1939. How common is it around the world? So plague is endemic in many parts of the world, including Russia and parts of Africa and Madagascar. It's actually even endemic in the United States Southwest, and there was a fatal case of pneumonic plague just the last year in Arizona.

So this disease does occur naturally. There are on average, you know, one or two thousand cases around the world. So even though everyone associates it with the black death from the Middle Ages, it is still a, you know, a current concern, albeit very limited areas. And we obviously now have much better hygiene and sanitation and medicine than we did back during the middle ages. So we're much better able to contain any plague outbreaks when they do occur. And to your point, I mean, it getting into the lungs can be very dangerous. But is it the kind of thing you've caught early that can be treated with antibiotics, like pneumonia, for example, would be?

Yes, so if you're able to diagnose it quickly and give the patient antibiotics, the survival rate goes up dramatically. So that is really key. And I think that is one of, unfortunately, the tragic, you know, elements of what happened in Siberia, because it sounds like this young woman didn't realize she had been exposed. And by the time she saw treatment, she was probably too far along in the progression of disease for the antibiotics to be affected. What do we know about what might have happened? Some of the reporting suggests that maybe there was a broken vial and that that led to her death? Yes, that is one of the more common reports. Again, the Russian government has really not provided any useful information here. And so anything we're talking about here is really almost speculation. But some of the reports do refer to her working in a clinical diagnostic lab at the institute, which means that she's handling. specimens of people who were ill and had come in for treatment and were getting their blood samples

culture to see what was infecting them. And reportedly, there was an accident, a test tube, but the specimen broke, and that is maybe what exposed her to the bacteria. So that is, you know, that does happen. It is, you know, not common for, you know, for this to result in pneumonic plague, but that is one plausible sounding route for what happened in this case. But again, we have no real details on that have been confirmed by any authorities. Well, and one of the reasons why there's all this confusion is because there were Russian authorities who were saying that the woman died from being diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown origin. Some officials initially posted that it was the plague, then deleted those comments,

which leads people to wonder why the comments were deleted or posted in the first place. Yeah, Russia has not been very transparent about this, which is problematic because it does create all sorts of uncertainty and anxiety in the public, which really could be avoided. Again, plague is a well-known disease. We have antibiotics that can be used to treat it. We have vaccines for it. So if it is plague, then there really isn't any good reason the Russian authorities can't kind of contain this incident to this one individual. And if there was some sort of biosafety accident at their lab, they need to kind of acknowledge that and then fix whatever problems were led to it. When you cover up and hide these kinds of incidents, that's what allows them to, you know, to reoccur because people haven't taken the steps they need to avoid those kinds of mistakes or accidents in the future.

What do you know about this lab in Siberia where this happened? So this lab has been around since the And it's the, you know, it's called the Anti-Plaug Research Institute because plague is endemic in that part of Russia. And Russia's a long history and a network of anti-plague institutes that were devoted to trying to combat this disease. And then they were largely successful. There hasn't been a human case of plague in Russia for, I think, over 10 years now. And so this is really just now a public health laboratory. They do diagnostic work for when there are outbreaks and people get sick. send the samples to this lab for testing to see what people have been infected with. And they do research on diseases that are affecting the population in the area. So even though it has kind of a ominous sounding name, it really is just a public health diagnostic and research laboratory. How many of these sorts of labs are there around the world, labs that deal with and work with dangerous pathogens? There are hundreds to thousands of these kinds of labs. laboratories because, you know, these labs need to have a certain level of protection for the

workers so that if you're dealing with samples, especially if you don't know what is in the sample, right, you need to be taking precautions with the right kind of safety equipment and containment. And, you know, one of lessons from COVID was, you know, that the public health systems in lots of countries was not prepared and they did not have the right kind of infrastructure and equipment to do the diagnostics and to protect workers at the same time. So we have seen an increase in just the overall number of public health labs in general over the past six years or so to meet that gap in the health preparedness. One of the other lessons from COVID, of course, is that there are many people who still

believe that that pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China. Are there lessons that can be learned from the investigations into the origins of COVID-19 to ensure that these labs which handle dangerous pathogens are as secure as possible? So, you know, one of the big lessons that I would have hoped Russia learned, but they don't appear to have, is the need for transparency. And, you know, this controversy about the Wuhan lab could have been resolved very easily, very quickly early on if the Chinese's government had just allowed access to the laboratory and been more transparent about what the lab was working on and those sorts of things. And their lack of transparency has really fueled a lot of some of the conspiracy theories around this. And the Russian approach has the potential to breed a similar kind of problem here. We saw that lack of transparency in the past, though. I mean,

Russia, when you think of AIDS, for example, and Russia was very quiet and even denying the existence of and the spread of AIDS and then suddenly had a real issue on its hands. Yeah. So unfortunately, it is very common for governments of all types to treat diseases as, you know, unwanted events that if they're ignored, they'll go away, or they don't want to be stigmatized or embarrassed in some way by admitting that there are these diseases and their populations. But again, that that just doesn't make the problem go away. It just makes it worse. And this is a problem is particularly bad within authoritarian regimes like Russia, like China, where, right, they want to control the information as much as possible and present this

appearance of stability. But again, that is kind of detrimental to standard public health practices, which is to share information with the public so they can be aware of what the risks are and they can, you know, help authorities, you know, avoid future cases. You know, the other real lesson, which unfortunately, not everyone has really learned, is the importance of having not only high biosefety and biosecurity standards, but having a mechanism to ensure that labs are complying with those standards. Russia does have some pretty rigorous biosafety laws on the books, but we don't know about how well they implement those biosafety practices in their laboratories.

and there is no international mechanism for doing so. So really, we have to take every lab's word for it that they are kind of in compliance, but there's no international system that would give us confidence that they really are adhering to the highest standards for bioseafety and biosecurity. I'll let you go. But just finally, you mentioned some concern or at the very least the fog around what the lab was actually working on. Dr. Ashish-Jah, who helped guide the Biden administration's COVID response,

says he's worried about the possibility this lab was working on biological weaponry that the United States intelligence services said that Russia's program has expanded in recent years. You've studied this. Is this something that we should be concerned about? So Russia does have an active expanding

biological weapons program. This institute, there's no evidence that it was part of the former Soviet program and the Russians have several military facilities where they do this research. So I don't, I've not seen anything

that would indicate that this particular institute is part of that. But obviously, the fact that Russia has an active bioweapons program does raise lots of concerns and is a separate issue that we need to be concerned about. But I don't think it's connected to this particular incident that we've been discussing. There are a lot of questions around this. I appreciate you giving us the answers that you have and kind of poking at some of the questions that we still need answered. Greg, thank you very much. Thank you. Gregory Koblenz is director of the Bio-Defense graduate program at George Mason University's Sharr School of Policy and Government. Also the co-director of the Global Biolabs Initiative, he was in Maryland.

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