“Unknown infection” at a “plague laboratory.” Well, let’s hope whatever genetically modded pathogen it is stays in the lab. Really would like to avoid a 12 Monkeys scenario.
It's never an "unknown infection" from the Build-A-Bear factory or the Dream Factory, you know a place that makes kids happy. It's always the hecking "Plagues-that-kill-you-horribly factory" or "Diseases-that-melt-your-eyes factory".
„woman died from an unknown infection” followed by „everybody that had contact with the victim tested negative”. I’d love to know how you would test for an unknown infection.
(ICU nurse here and former public health specialist). It would be a rule out process: test for everything (i.e., pan cultures). If still not identified you’d then send specimens to state and federal labs for analysis and cross your fingers. If still not identified you’d keep the patient quarantined and do everything to prevent the pathogen from getting into the general population. I would presume they’d have a similar process in Russia, but maybe they know what it is and just aren’t releasing all of the information related to the infection. Difficult to trust anything out of Russia, and they have a terrible history of hiding their infectious disease incidence data.
Ok, but if the pathogen isn’t identified, that (hopefully) means they tested the first patient and she didn’t test positive for anything, so saying those exposed to her didn’t test positive either isn’t particularly helpful.
They would do contact tracing. Since the patient died from an “unknown infection,” they would find out who was in contact with the deceased and quarantine them until they were outside of the window for potentially passing on contagions to others (at least 30 days). If there were no symptoms and no evidence of an immunological response (e.g., abnormal differentials, inflammatory response, dycrasias or abnormal immune factors) they would be cleared. Presumably this incident occurred in a lab (hopefully with all guardrails in place) so exposure should be limited unless people they came in contact with were exposed to a pathogen that could be transmitted via direct or indirect contact, etc., and had contact with others outside the lab. I guess time will tell. If we start seeing public health alerts over there or WHO bulletins we’ll have our answer. When Marburg virus was first discovered, it was being analyzed in a lab in England. It escaped and killed a secretary who was exposed to via a sub par ventilation system that went from the containment area and flowed the through area where she worked.
They have apparently quarantined 200+ people and a few hospitals. Hopefully this wasn’t a modified form of the microbe. Pneumonic plague spreads rather quickly. Odd that the report said “unknown infection” but other reports are saying it’s pneumonic plague.
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u/Emotional-Zone9147 6h ago
“Unknown infection” at a “plague laboratory.” Well, let’s hope whatever genetically modded pathogen it is stays in the lab. Really would like to avoid a 12 Monkeys scenario.