On 2 October 2026, Igor Kobzev, the governor of the Irkutsk region in Russia, spoke to the public about a death. He talked about “a particularly dangerous infection.” He also said that “the situation is under strict control.” But for the first 24 hours, neither he nor the other regional officials used the word “plague.”
The woman who died was Darya Shipilova. She was 28 years old and worked as a laboratory assistant at the Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute. Her job was to work with dangerous germs. She died in the hospital in Shelekhov, a town near the city of Irkutsk. Local media reported that she had broken a test tube with plague germs inside it.
According to early reports, she told doctors that the tube broke by accident while she was collecting samples. She went to hospital on 29 September with a very bad lung infection. Doctors put her on a machine that helped her breathe, but she died a few days later. The Kyiv Independent reported that the tube held the germ that causes pneumonic plague.
This is the most dangerous kind of plague. It attacks the lungs, and it can pass from one person to another when someone coughs. At first it looks like many other lung illnesses. Without quick treatment, a person can die within a few days. People who were near a sick person can take medicine to protect themselves.
So health officials had to find everyone who had been close to her. By 2 October, nearly 200 people were under medical observation. The hospital in Shelekhov was closed to the public until a special team could check it.
In the next region, Buryatia, the leader Alexei Tsydenov was less careful. He said that the woman had died of plague. He also wrote on social media that there was no plague in his republic and that she had never visited it. Later, his message was changed to more careful words. On 3 October, officials in the town of Baikalsk told people not to travel to Shelekhov because of plague. A few hours later, they deleted the message. This confusion caused panic on social media across the region.
Life in the area began to change. On 4 October, Artem Fominykh, the director of a large aluminium factory in Shelekhov, told workers to wear masks. He asked anyone who felt ill to see a doctor at once. According to the news outlet Lyudi Baikala, several hospitals in Irkutsk closed for three weeks, including a children’s hospital. People in Shelekhov saw others in the streets in protective suits, masks and gloves. Parents said that their children got masks at kindergarten.
A health worker told Lyudi Baikala that doctors in Irkutsk were “openly talking about plague.” But the word did not appear in any official papers. The Kyiv Independent said it could not check this report.
Accidents like this are not new. Workers have caught diseases in laboratories since at least 1885, and the danger still exists today.
On Sunday, 4 October, Russia’s health agency, Rospotrebnadzor, finally spoke. It said that the situation in the region was stable. It said that the woman had died of a lung infection with an unknown cause.
This was not exactly wrong, because doctors need laboratory tests to be sure about plague. But by then, a hospital was closed and children were wearing masks. In Irkutsk, people now had an official name for Darya Shipilova’s death. They also had the word that, according to one source, doctors were already saying out loud.