Official says WHO doesn’t know exactly how lab worker in Russia died in plague case

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.

Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO director of Epidemic and Pandemic Management, said the agency doesn’t know what the “causative agent” was behind the woman’s October 2 death, and “this is why we need more information”.

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.

“We don’t understand how she was infected,” Van Kerkhove said.

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.

Since the suspicious death of the lab worker, Russian authorities have kept a tight lid on information about it. The incident has been surrounded by secrecy and claims that it could have been caused by pneumonic plague.

While the case has raised global concerns, Russian state TV and other national state-controlled media have steered clear of the subject. Some state-sponsored news outlets withdrew earlier reports about the case.