How worried should you be about the plague?

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[upbeat music] This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current podcast. There are growing calls for Russia to share more information after a 28-year-old woman who worked at a Siberian plague research lab died last week. Russian authorities haven't said a whole lot about this, only that she died from a pneumonia of undetermined origin. There are reports that officials have put the facility where she was treated under quarantine and that nearly 200 people who'd been in contact with her are under medical observation. The World Health Organization says the public health risk appears to be low. A lot is unknown about this case, but it is raising questions about how labs around the world keep deadly pathogens secure. Gregory Koblentz is director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University in Virginia, also co-director of the Global Biolabs Initiative, which tracks high-containment labs and biorisk management policies around the world. Greg, good morning.

Good morning. How are you?

I'm well, thanks. Plague, that doesn't sound good. Uh, how concerned should people be about this?

W- well, at, at this point, w- we shouldn't be that concerned since this is a report of just one case, uh, in Siberia, so that is geographically very remote and, um, uh, we don't have indications yet of the, um, the disease spreading, uh, beyond the reported case. So if the information being provided by Russia is accurate, which there need to be big question marks about-

Hmm

... uh, at, at this point this is relatively, uh, low-risk incident.

What kind of plague are we talking about here?

So some of the reports, uh, say that the, uh, the patient died of pneumonic plague, which is one of three types of this disease, and this is the most des- severe type because it means that plague bacteria have gotten into the person's lungs, and this then is, uh, much more severe and more likely to be a fatal infection.

Mm.

And then very worry- worryingly, uh, is also, um, w- is what enables, um, that person to spread the disease to other people because it's in the lungs and they can cough out, uh, plague bacteria, um, a- as they're ill. So, so it's concerning for both the severity of it and the ability of it to be transmitted from person to person.

Plague is one of those words, as I said at the beginning, that kind of chills people in some ways. We heard yesterday from the Public Health Agency of Canada saying that human cases of plague are very rare in this country. The last case reported was in 1939. How common is it around the world?

So plague is endemic in, in many parts of the world, um, including, uh, Russia and, um, uh, parts of Africa and, and