Tuberculosis is a serious disease and it has been around for a long time. But there are well-established ways to detect it and a range of drugs to treat it.

TB can be either latent, which isn't contagious, or active. A person must be in close contact with an infected person to become infected, which could potentially describe the conditions in a Russian orphanage. According to the Mayo Clinic, a woman with active TB can sometimes pass the disease to her fetus, but that is rare. In many cases, the body's own immune system defeats TB; that defeat can result in a positive TB test, but not... more

So imagine you're a journalist who has just reported that a study concluded that children who were adopted between 1986 and 2001 had a high rate of infection from tuberculosis. What would your next step be? If you answered ask whether the infection rate is still that high, you get a gold star. Unfortunately, the Canadian Press reporter behind the story in part one didn't.

Luckily, there is some good recent data to answer that question.

In March of this year, the World Health Organization released a report, "Global... more

The newsletter from the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute arrived in my e-mail late last week and it contained a scary headline: "TUBERCULOSIS INFECTIONS IN INTERNATIONAL ADOPTEES REPORTED RISING". According to the accompanying blurb, children from Russia had the second highest rate of infection. Wow. I immediately bookmarked it for a post this week.

And then, as I frequently tell my kids, there's the truth.

Let me say, before I get too far into this post, that I do not in any way mean to downplay the seriousness of tuberculosis.... more