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Russian lab worker dies of suspected plague after ‘being exposed to virus by broken test tube’
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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Wow. What’s Putin doing, manufacturing plague to deal with Ukraine?
Always has been.
The USSR from the Stalin era onwards had world-leading biological and chemical weapons programmes, largely due to having plenty of test subjects in the gulag system.
There are very legitimate reasons to be doing research like this. Every developed nation pretty much has labs like this.
However, that isn't to say none of these are attempting to make weapons. The issue is research for a weapon like this looks pretty much identical to the good kind of research. The only way to know the difference would be getting your hands on documents saying it's for a weapon.
Sure, but, Putin.
what kind of scientist accidently breaks open a test tube containing plague
I've lost count of the glassware I've broken. Now none of them were plague cultures, but I wouldn't get less clumsy just because they were.
Also this sort of thing becomes more likely when we're overworked and tired. So if you don't want another plague, it might be a good idea to make sure your local scientists have reasonable workloads.
Never underestimate the human capacity for failure.
There are a lot of labs who work on all kinds of diseases. They keep them in test tubes sometimes. Accidents happen. The big issue is there should be protocols that prevent that accident from spreading, which there apparently weren't in this case. This could be for a ton of reasons, like the person not following protocol, or issues caused by a lack of funding due to the war. I don't think we can really speculate on why this happened, just that it did, and the fact that they were doing this work isn't that strange.