TOMSK, SIBERIA: Europe ignores Russia’s public health problems at its peril. So do the other industrialized countries who cheered the Soviet Union’s fall but have failed to respond to the collapse of Russia’s health and social-service infrastructure. For out of a confused swirl of economic ideology and sometimes insensitive advice has emerged a new form of drug-resistant tuberculosis that is proving hard to contain. Much has been made of Russia’s plummeting life expectancies – its "mortality crisis." Although that grim trend appears to be being slowly reversed, another problem is spiraling out of control: tuberculosis. In several regions of Russia, young men fall ill and die from tuberculosis at rates well in excess of ten times those documented a mere decade ago; in some non-Russian areas of the former USSR, the story is even worse.
TOMSK, SIBERIA: Europe ignores Russia’s public health problems at its peril. So do the other industrialized countries who cheered the Soviet Union’s fall but have failed to respond to the collapse of Russia’s health and social-service infrastructure. For out of a confused swirl of economic ideology and sometimes insensitive advice has emerged a new form of drug-resistant tuberculosis that is proving hard to contain. Much has been made of Russia’s plummeting life expectancies – its "mortality crisis." Although that grim trend appears to be being slowly reversed, another problem is spiraling out of control: tuberculosis. In several regions of Russia, young men fall ill and die from tuberculosis at rates well in excess of ten times those documented a mere decade ago; in some non-Russian areas of the former USSR, the story is even worse.