The accident occurred on May 5, when Antonina Presnyakova was conducting research on Ebola, a virus for which no vaccine or remedy exists, said Natalya Skultetskaya, a spokeswoman for the Vektor State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology outside Novosibirsk.
Skultetskaya said efforts to save Presnyakova failed and she died on May 19 at a special hospital located on the territory of the center. Research and medical personnel who were in contact with Presnyakova during her treatment will remain under medical observation for three weeks, she said by telephone.
Skultetskaya denied a report in The New York Times that the center was slow to inform the World Health Organization about the incident, reporting it only last week. She said the case was reported immediately to both the Health and Social Development Ministry and the WHO. "We received all the necessary medical assistance," she said. "On the WHO's advice, we had a conference call involving a doctor who treated Ebola patients in Africa."
The incident was the third case of accidental contraction of a deadly virus at Vektor, which served as a top biological weapons laboratory in Soviet times.
One Vektor researcher accidentally contracted the Marburg virus and died in 1988, while another worker contracted it and survived in 1990, Skultetskaya said. In a 1996 incident at another biological research center, the Defense Ministry's Virology Center in Sergiyev Posad, a worker accidentally contracted the Ebola virus and died, Skultetskaya said.
Ebola is spread by contact with bodily fluids, including sweat and saliva. Outbreaks of the disease are rare, and no one knows where the virus lives when it is not infecting humans. The disease usually kills its victims so fast that it also destroys the host for the virus.
Skultetskaya said Vektor was conducting research on the Ebola and Marburg viruses to develop vaccines for the lethal diseases. "We have achieved some progress," she said.
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