After an apparent lab accident in Siberia, Moscow is reverting to its old Soviet ways.
By By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic
The scenario is right out of a Stephen King novel: At a medical lab stashed away in a remote Siberian city, a pretty young technician was exposed to a deadly pathogen. She died, the lab went into lockdown, and soon rumors emerged that the Russian security services were on the scene. Now the world waits to see whether some monstrous microbe is going to make its way out of Russia’s forests.
What’s going on in Russia is bad, but—at least so far—not that bad. We know that someone working at a research institute that studies various forms of plague has died of pneumonia, which suggests that she mishandled a sample of pneumonic plague. That’s about it. Medical observers are rightly concerned: Pneumonic plague is nasty stuff. But it’s also not some unknown bug; a few hundred cases appear every year, and it is easily cured with antibiotics if diagnosed quickly enough. Counterintuitively, the pathogen’s deadliness limits the disease’s ability to spread: It kills its victims before they can infect too many other people. (ln this case, the remote location of the Russian facility might also help to contain any outbreak.)
