Yet another Hacker News

Nearly 200 People Under Observation After Irkutsk Lab Worker Dies from Plague

113 points ericmay 2 hours ago 65 comments

abnry 1 hour ago | parent

How often does this sort of thing happen? I'm guessing more than we think, either because we forget the news stories we read or because it isn't reported.

jmyeet 1 hour ago | parent

Janet Parker was the last person to die of smallpox and, yes, she caught it in a lab [1].

[1]: https://whyy.org/segments/the-tragic-case-of-smallpoxs-final...

dnautics 1 hour ago | parent

There was a COVID 19 lab leak in Taiwan about a year into the pandemic.

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/4374289

Six errors contributed to this leak.

breadzeppelin__ 1 hour ago | parent

Bubonic plague is known to be active in Colorado, I think there are a handful of cases each year

dreamcompiler 1 hour ago | parent

If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.

fc417fc802 35 minutes ago | parent

> avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine

I thought at least fleas could transfer it between mammals?

mycall 45 minutes ago | parent

Also ask how much is this failed route procedures because organisms or viri of this variety won't continue without human sustainment which is prone to human failures...

helsinkiandrew 1 hour ago | parent

So breaks a test tube of live bacteria at an “anti-plague institute”, possible infects 100 colleagues, then when she developed plague like symptoms is taken to hospital and possibly infects 100 patients.

I think they need to investigate their safety protocols

> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.

> At least 197 people who may have had contact with her were reportedly placed under medical isolation, including more than 100 in hospital wards.

hliyan 1 hour ago | parent

Was this a glass test tube? I understand why glass is probably the best material for the inner lining of containers that hold biological material, but I'm surprised that there aren't better solutions for hazardous material (e.g. an unbreakable, transparent polymer outer coating).

doodlesdev 55 minutes ago | parent

I believe the biggest reason to use glass is that it doesn't react with much stuff, but I've yet to see an explanation for why your idea wouldn't work. I imagine there could be problems with autoclaves (i.e. degradation of the polymer) and fear of chemical leaching.

fc417fc802 39 minutes ago | parent

Polymer coated glass is commonplace in chemistry labs for large containers of hazardous reagents held in storage. There's no chemical leaching concern because it's on the outside.

If anything, disposable plastic test tubes are the norm in microbiology labs at this point. No need to autoclave because they come sterile and you throw them away after a single use.

Plenty of plastic that's designed for it goes through the autoclave. For example micropipette tips. Nearly all of it is disposable single use so it only has to withstand a single cycle.

smsm42 52 minutes ago | parent

That's Russia we're talking about. You can have 1000 protocols and people will ignore them anyway. You can ask a ton of questions, like was she immunized before working with plague (Russia has pretty effective vaccines against all types) and if not why the heck not, why they use easily breakable test tubes to hold dangerous pathogens, how the incident with live biomaterial was not immediately reported and caused a lockdown, but they allowed waiting for symptoms and then going to a general hospital, etc., etc. - but the answer for all of that, I suspect, is: "it's Russia". For an American, it's hard to appreciate to what measure Russia is not a "safety culture" country.

mkotlikov 40 minutes ago | parent

I don't think there is any actual evidence that it was a broken test tube because she would have started on prophylactic antibiotic treatment immediately.

Luckily you need to be in close contact with someone already very sick to catch it. It's not silent transmission like COVID. But maybe there is something different about this outbreak?

robmusial 1 hour ago | parent

I literally just finished Annie Jacobsen's book 'Biological War: A Scenario' last week where the central plot point is an accidental release of modified form of pneumonic plague from a lab in Siberia. Very coincidental timing, especially since it made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.

DJBunnies 1 hour ago | parent

How’d it turn out, are we boned?

Betelbuddy 1 hour ago | parent

Netflix ends up the series after Season 1, just after your are emotionally invested...

robmusial 1 hour ago | parent

No spoilers but Jacobsen's scenario books don't end with "and society came together, acted rationally, and solved the problem!"

petcat 1 hour ago | parent

> made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.

Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.

mvlipwig 1 hour ago | parent

It's difficult to say for sure, but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market. (I'm not very well researched on this topic and don't have any formal background in it, so hedge accordingly)

fsckboy 26 minutes ago | parent

there is zero evidence for zoonotic origin, and messages have been found and made public showing that the public proponents of a zoonotic origin hypothesis were in private saying "lab leak".

https://archive.ph/WTsga

SV_BubbleTime 25 minutes ago | parent

>but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market

I literally had to check the date on this post.

Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”… but “they eat tainted exotic animals at wet markets” was “the consensus”?

Wild times!

porkpies101 10 minutes ago | parent

We should not be eating animals period

refulgentis 6 minutes ago | parent

Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird. It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.

hansvm 1 hour ago | parent

Last I saw, plausible, unconfirmed, nobody is willing/able to provide enough information to be able to confirm one way or another.

lumost 1 hour ago | parent

I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.

We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.

aliljet 43 minutes ago | parent

Were they first patients?

jijji 23 minutes ago | parent

Well, according to some reports, the first reported incidents happened in November 2019 and the months prior, from people who worked at Wuhan Institute of Virology (according to US government sources) [0]. Those people were: Ben Hu, Yu Ping, Zhu Yan.

[0] https://www.public.news/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid-19

soganess 5 minutes ago | parent

Not according to them and the (reputable) publication Science: https://www.science.org/content/article/ridiculous-says-chin...

cma 42 minutes ago | parent

Source on first patients being WIV workers? I think there was a US intelligence report that claimed several fell ill in Nov., some with incompatible symptoms, and with claims from WIV they didn't test positive for antibodies (not saying take those at face value). There's also the wet market and the sampling done in gutters around the different stalls and a whole competing story there, which is also the kind of scenario in the 2002 SARS outbreak.

fsckboy 36 minutes ago | parent

>...were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus...

...with funding from a US group that discussed conducting this gain of function research in China using a spike protein at the furin cleavage site, a group whose members were appointed to come up with an explanation for what had happened.

chihuahua 1 hour ago | parent

All the evidence was destroyed (probably just a coincidence, LOL), so it can't be proved either way.

felixg3 1 hour ago | parent

Pretty much confirmed by western intelligence including the German BND

gruez 1 hour ago | parent

Source?

theoreticalmal 56 minutes ago | parent

Copy and paste this into Google: Wuhan lab leak fbi

MitziMoto 49 minutes ago | parent

Ah, the old "Do your research!".

alexnewman 1 hour ago | parent

I get downvoted every time I say this but the evidence doesn’t even prove it started in wuhan, or even China. It could of easily been brought here by the military games that happened before that

theoreticalmal 56 minutes ago | parent

Do you have any thoughts as to why the FBI disagrees with your perspective?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903

bix6 48 minutes ago | parent

I don’t but this guy in your article does

> A natural origin is still the more likely theory, said Professor David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at University of Glasgow.

ericmay 43 minutes ago | parent

So the suggestion is that it occurred naturally in China and then military games happened near Wuhan which spread the virus? Or did someone from Wuhan with ties/service in the Chinese military contract the virus locally and then spread it throughout China via travel to these military games?

Is that right, or is your point simply that it naturally occurred in China in the vicinity of Wuhan? I ask since the OP mentioned military games.

alexnewman 41 minutes ago | parent

They don’t disagree. They don’t know. They just said what’s most likely. They don’t even give a %

toast0 14 minutes ago | parent

Is the US FBI a credible investigator for something like this?

a) I don't know that they have the right skills to track down patient zero of a disease.

b) They certainly don't have jurisdiction to do such an investigation in a foreign country, unless invited, and there's no way they were invited.

I strongly doubt we'll ever see a good answer on this, unless we get very lucky and some random research sample is looked at later that shows detection months earlier in a different location or if the Chinese did a good investigation and kept it quiet, but it leaks in a couple decades.

A timely and thorough investigation might have been able to determine an origin, but the US FBI certainly didn't do one.

potatoproduct 59 minutes ago | parent

Chinas actions following the event includes the destruction of evidence, refusal of access and using the WHO as their personal mouthpiece. Unless history is rewritten too, every textbook should clearly point to China.

vachina 48 minutes ago | parent

Source? Your account is no better hearsay.

sudo_cowsay 44 minutes ago | parent

ur username?

nxm 33 minutes ago | parent

It’s clear that they knew about the extent of the issue weeks earlier and tried to contain it, rather than letting the world know

ruficufi274 34 minutes ago | parent

now do NIH / Doge / Twitter

Mobius01 34 minutes ago | parent

How did you enjoy the book? I did like her nuclear war volume, but it could have used some editing.

aworks 19 minutes ago | parent

I preferred the Nuclear War scenario book. Same style of narrative mixed with expert insights. The first several days of the scenario were riveting, after that less so. This one tries to describe the impact of social media and influencers, which I found inconclusive.

She also reports that Bush rode in the back of a laundry truck on the day of 9/11 to avoid detection getting to the Doomsday plane. Single source attribution, though.

hn_throwaway_99 1 hour ago | parent

> The woman was identified as Daria Sh., a 27- or 28-year-old employee of the Irkutsk anti-plague institute, by the exiled news outlet Lyudi Baikala (People of Baikal) and pro-Kremlin broadcaster REN TV.

> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.

This is just weird. Plague is easily treated if antibiotics are given right away. I'm shocked that an anti-plague institute wouldn't have detailed and proactive plans in case of mishaps. Obviously I think it's likely that there is more to it than what's reported in the article, but I would find it truly baffling if within 60 seconds of her breaking that test tube that protocols weren't initiated to protect her, her colleagues and the community.

Of course, Russia...

mrkstu 1 hour ago | parent

I'm assuming if its a bio-lab that its a gain of function version that may be immune to conventional antibiotics.

Actually went to a scout camp as a teenager (in the 80s) and one of our scouts got the plauge. Took a long while for the hospital to identify it and get him on heavy antibiotics because no one had seen it in real life before.

mycall 40 minutes ago | parent

Hopefully long while is under 24 hours like this plague is.

smsm42 45 minutes ago | parent

She probably didn't tell anybody she broke the tube, because, you know, they might yell at her and it may cost her a bit of money if they discover she was clumsy. So she just went home and when she felt bad, went to the hospital. Where nobody knew shit about the plague, as expected - when a person with respiratory symptoms in the autumn shows up in a hospital, nobody thinks "let's test her for plague". When she died, and when they learned where she worked, probably some major "oh shit!" lightbulbs gone up, but by then it was a done deed.

kgeist 44 minutes ago | parent

It's not clear if she even died from plague. The Russian-language version of the article lists various "versions" of what happened, and her breaking a test tube is only listed as one of the versions. Sounds like random rumors but at the same time, you can't trust the government either (which says no one has tested for plague positively). What's clear is that an employee at an "anti-plague' institute suddenly died from pneumonia-like symptoms, which certainly sounds suspicious but interpreting it as evidence of a plague infection may also be an overreaction

bitwize 22 minutes ago | parent

"Don't worry, Mikhail. We have extensive containment measures in place. In case pathogen breaks containment, detachment of troops stands ready to terminate all remaining personnel and burn facility to ground."

"But sir, you are talking about—"

"I am talking about courageous scientists giving their lives to protect Mother Russia. Any further questions?"

chasil 43 minutes ago | parent

Yersinia Pestis is normally treated with doxycycline, cipro, or streptomycin.

Is this a resistant strain?

https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/235627-medication#1

r721 19 minutes ago | parent

>Oct. 2

Here's a newer CNN story from today:

>Researcher at Russian plague laboratory dies of ‘unknown’ infection

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/04/europe/russia-laboratory-...

This post from local Irkutsk region media (now in exile) is also interesting:

https://t.me/Baikal_People/16651 (in Russian)

ungreased0675 18 minutes ago | parent

Are we fairly confident that these labs do more good than the risk they present to the public? I’m not sure we should be keeping dangerous pathogens around just for giggles and PhD papers. What are examples of how the research done in these places improves public health?

vincnetas 16 minutes ago | parent

knowledge. how to handle that and how it looks/works. if you forget it you will be reminded later.

ungreased0675 11 minutes ago | parent

You’re describing documentation though.

poilcn 9 minutes ago | parent

This information that she "broke a tube" is tabloid bs.

Non-tabloid position is that she didn't catch it in the lab, she got ill "while being on a research trip to Buryatia region near the border where sources of the disease were found".