Official says WHO does not know how lab worker in Russia died in plague case

Scientists disagree over how scared we should be by the mysterious death of a worker at a Russian plague lab. A young laboratory technician died earlier this month of an undisclosed illness after working on research at the Irkutsk Antiplague Research Institute of Siberia and Far East. Although officials have not released details about the cause of death, scientists agree that if it was caused by ordinary plague, the wider world has little to worry about. This bacterial illness is infamous for the explosive killing spree known as the Black Death, which wiped out between a third and half of the population of Europe between 1347 and 1353. Today, however, plague is curable and extremely unlikely to blow up into a new pandemic, experts say. That's thanks to a combination of antibiotic development, scientific understanding and luck.