Trump to press Putin on plague death in Siberia

US President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would speak “very soon” with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the reported plague death of a laboratory technician, as Washington and the World Health Organization pressed Moscow for greater transparency and clarity over conflicting accounts of the incident in Siberia. Russian authorities denied imposing anti-plague measures and said postmortem tests found no disease, with the cause of death listed as "undetermined." The US State Department sent a confidential demarche warning that failure to disclose details violates international health obligations, while WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed the need for transparent information sharing. The WHO assessed the risk to Irkutsk as "moderate to low" and confirmed no dangerous pathogens were found in contacts. Russia's health watchdog countered Trump's aid offer by highlighting US measles outbreaks and a fatal plague case in New Mexico, while an international plague conference is scheduled in Irkutsk for October 21-22.