Once upon a time in Russia, as in many countries, it was unseemly for women to drink and certainly to drink to excess. That began to change in the 1960s and, while it may not be possible to put the genie back in the bottle, some health professionals are working to educate Russian women and their doctors about the problems caused by drinking during pregnancy.

One of them is Tatiana Balachova, and I had a chance to interview her last week. Born and educated in Russia, Balachova is now an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma, and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Training Initiative for Underserved Children at its Center on Child Abuse and Neglect.

Thanks to some funding from the National Institutes on Health in the United States, she has been interviewing women and doctors in St. Petersburg to determine what they know about fetal alcohol syndrome and its related disorders. The answer, unfortunately, seems to be not much--in both groups. Some women she interviewed for her initial focus groups--the majority of whom were highly educated--thought that parental alcohol consumption could cause a baby to be born an alcoholic, while some doctors thought that FAS was curable or that the term referred to an alcohol-dependent newborn. "I was surprised by the doctors," Balachova concedes, "I thought they would know more."

Balachova has spent a long time working on alcoholism in Russia. Before she came to Oklahoma for a post-doctoral fellowship in 2001, she had spent more than 20 years working in treatment programs for alcohol abusers in St. Petersburg. In 1988, she began working with the children of alcoholics, and supervising studies comparing the children of alcoholics and non-alcoholics. And it was at about that time, she recalls, that she first heard the term fetal alcohol syndrome, from an American friend who was working at Brown University.

With the NIH grant, Balachova first created focus groups to determine what women and their doctors knew about FAS. She published that methodology in the journal Substance Use and Misuse and you can access it here. She then expanded her study to groups more representative of the Russian population as a whole and says those results will be published next spring. Her goal is to find which kind of FAS prevention appeals Russians will respond to and create educational materials that match those appeals. Balachova hopes that she will be able to adapt some of the training materials created by the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. for use in Russia. She has already gotten a grant to create an educational Web site, but believes that there have to be printed materials that can be handed out to women in doctor's offices, health clinics and treatment programs.

You may wonder why the money to do all this is coming from American government sources. The NIH, to its credit, is taking a global view of many diseases. But I did some digging and found out that while combating alcoholism is a priority for President Vladimir Putin, the funding for FAS research is even more scarce in Russia than it is here.

Let's hope work like this begins to get the money flowing.