Prince George's County, Maryland - Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that the US is monitoring reports of a plague infection at a Russian laboratory but that it is not a "cause for alarm."
"There's very limited travel between the US and Russia, obviously, but like anything else, something like that gets out, it could quickly spread," Rubio told reporters before taking off on a visit to Iceland.
"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," Rubio added.
News that the Trump administration was monitoring the situation broke on Sunday, as Axios first reported.
Daria Shipilova, a 28-year-old researcher at an anti-plague institute in Irkutsk, broke a test tube on September 25 containing live Yersinia Pestis, the deadly bacteria responsible for the black plague. She died on October 2.
"The sanitary and epidemiological situation in the Irkutsk region, the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov is stable," Russia's state agency that handles infectious diseases told CNN.
The agency claims that Shipilova died of a "pneumonia of unknown etiology." Because of this, protective measures have been are underway, such as quarantining around 200 people who had been in close contact with the researcher.