If you have been around the world of Russian adoption for any amount of time, you have heard or read bleak assessments of what happens to the children who age out of its orphanages. Never having found a forever family in Russia or abroad, these young people often go out into the world ill-prepared for life on their own.

But last week, I was reminded in stark terms of the challenges they face. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released a study that was conducted to learn how many of the street youth in St. Petersburg were HIV positive. The research was conducted by Dimitry M. Kissin of the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and scientists from Doctors Of The World-USA and the City AIDS Center in St. Petersburg.

The researchers interviewed and tested 313 teenagers aged 15-19 at 41 locations around St. Petersburg in early 2006. They found that 37.4% were infected with HIV, which would be bad enough. But when they mapped the infection rate against the kids' backgrounds, they found an HIV infection rate of 64.3% among those who had neither a mother nor a father. The infection rate was 47.3% among single orphans, but only 26.1% among those who did not identify themselves as orphans. When they looked at where these teenagers lived, the researchers found that those who had no place to live had an infection rate of 68.1%. The teens who said they lived in a dorm, shelter or orphanage had an infection rate of 31.6%. All of which comes down to this: If you are a kid on the streets in St. Petersburg and you have ever lived in an orphanage, your odds of testing positive for HIV are 2.9; if you are a double orphan the odds rise to 3.3. (You can see a summary of their findings here.)

No, I'm not enough of a Pollyanna to believe that adoption, and the love of a forever family, will cure all of the world's ills. But I've got to believe that finding homes for some of Russia's children may ease some of them.

Image credit: Pedro Jose Perez, Morguefile.com