Russian Plague Scare: How an Outbreak Report Gets Checked
In early October, a worker at a plague research institute in Irkutsk, Russia, died after being hospitalized with severe pneumonia, and media reports suspected pneumonic plague. On October 10, the World Health Organization published its report on the case. Its title doesn't say plague. It says "Pneumonia of undetermined etiology."
So which is it? This episode doesn't claim to solve the case. It explains how you can tell, for this story and the next one: what plague is today and how it reaches people, what it takes for a suspected case to become a confirmed one, how a report travels from a…
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