Russian authorities told the World Health Organisation on Tuesday that there were no cases of plague in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, where a laboratory worker at a plague research institute died last week.
Moscow had previously told the WHO that authorities were investigating whether pneumonic plague had caused her death.
“No case of this dangerous disease has been recorded in the city of Irkutsk,” Russian authorities said in an official response to a WHO request, read out by Christian Lindmeier, a spokesman for the UN health agency, at a Geneva press briefing.
Russian authorities also told the WHO that they had identified the people in contact with the dead laboratory worker and that test results for dangerous infectious pathogens were negative.
Rubio request
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Russia should reveal more about the laboratory worker's death.
“I think it's incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” Mr Rubio told reporters in Iceland. “We're watching it very closely, hour by hour.”
He said the US had “measures” available to help Russia if the situation turned out to be more serious than has so far been acknowledged, but it needed to know more before it could step in.
President Donald Trump said on Monday that the US would help, and added that the outbreak was a “big problem for Russia.”
The WHO has previously said that the risk of plague to the general population appeared to be low.
