US monitors suspected plague case in Russian lab worker amid fears of internal spread, says Rubio
Washington: The United States is closely monitoring a suspected plague case involving a worker at a Russian laboratory amid concern that the infection may have spread internally, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
Rubio said Washington’s information about the incident was limited to what Russian authorities had provided, but US officials were watching the situation because of the potential for an infectious disease to spread beyond its initial location.
“We don’t – we know what we know, obviously, about whatever the Russians have provided, which is it seems that there was a worker at the lab that was infected, and there’s concern that that could have spread, at least internally,” Rubio told reporters at Joint Base Andrews before departing on a European trip.
“So you’ve seen them do quarantines with this – of that nature,” he said.
Rubio stressed that travel between Russia and the United States is limited but said Washington was taking the situation seriously because of the possibility of wider transmission.
“There’s very limited travel between the U.S. and Russia, obviously. But like anything else, something like that gets out, it could quickly spread,” Rubio said.
“So we’re watching and monitoring it closely. I don’t think it’s cause for alarm, but it is cause for focus and a cause to just keep an eye on it, and we’re doing that,” he said.
Rubio did not identify the Russian laboratory, the location of the suspected case or the form of plague involved. He also did not say whether US officials had independently confirmed the infection.
His comments indicated that the information available to Washington had come from Russia.
Rubio spoke during a wide-ranging exchange with reporters that also covered Russia’s war in Ukraine, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, US military deployments in Britain and the administration’s longer-term national security planning.
Asked separately about Russia urging foreign diplomats in Kyiv to leave the Ukrainian capital, Rubio said Moscow had been issuing such warnings for months.
The United States, he said, continued to maintain an embassy presence in Kyiv and would make its own assessment of the security situation.
“We analyze every single day the safety of every diplomatic mission in the world, and if a threat arises that we feel needs to be addressed by a change in posture, we’ll do so,” Rubio said.
“We haven’t done that up to this point there.”
Rubio was also questioned about the movement of American bombers from RAF Fairford in Britain following a threat the previous week.
He cautioned against directly connecting the aircraft movements with the threat, saying US military assets and personnel are routinely rotated and redeployed.
“The Department of War is constantly reallocating resources where they need to be,” Rubio said.
Asked whether Washington remained confident about British security at the base, Rubio said it did.
“We have confidence in the security of all of our bases, because all of our bases are theoretically – could be threatened at any moment, and that’s why there’s so much security built around them,” he said.
Rubio said British authorities had worked closely with the United States on the investigation into the threat.
Plague is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and occurs in several forms, including bubonic, septicaemic and pneumonic plague. Transmission risks differ depending on the form of the disease, with pneumonic plague capable of spreading between people through respiratory droplets.
