Plague may have resurfaced in Russia. But this isn’t the Black Death.

On October 1, 2026, the inpatient unit at the district hospital in Shelekhov, in Russia’s Irkutsk region, closed because of a suspected “especially dangerous infection.” Media outlets later reported that 28-year-old Darya Shipilova had died there of pneumonic plague. According to one account, she was a laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute and accidentally broke a test tube containing the bacterium that causes the disease. There has been no official confirmation that she died of plague; the authorities say she had “pneumonia of unknown cause.”