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 Tuberculosis Epidemic Leveling Off". The statistics collected by WHO researchers indicate that Russia ranked 12 out of 22 countries in the incidence of all forms of TB, based on 2005 data. The top five countries were 1) India, 2) China, 3) Indonesia, 4) Kenya and 5) Bangladesh.

Twelfth out of 22 means that Russia had 119 incidences of TB per 100,000 population in 2005, and its incidence rate grew 0.3% between 2004 and 2005. That compares to 168 per 100,000 for India. (You can read the report's section on Russia here.) And while I would have preferred to have seen no increase in Russia's cases, when I report on growth in a business' income, 0.3% growth would be considered flat.

But the WHO report covers all cases of TB and doesn't specifically focus on the disease in children. So for the pediatric perspective, I turned to a huge new report from the Russian office of UNICEF called "Situation Analysis of Children in the Russian Federation 2007". (The report runs 101 pages and I hope to get through it all soon.)

The UNICEF report notes that TB in Russia primarily affects working-age males. For children up to age 14, Russia’s tuberculosis prevalence rate was 16.4 cases per 100,000 people as of 2004. (That compares with 1.6 per 100,000 in the United States according to the American Lung Association.) UNICEF says that Russia's immunization rate for TB was 96.1% of all birth to age two children as of 2005, a statistic that compares pretty favorably with the rate of immunization in the U.S. And UNICEF notes that, while drug-resistant TB is a concern in Russia, the country has overall made strides in controlling the disease.

Should you ask about exposure to TB and TB immunization records when you consider a referral from Russia? Yes. Should concern about TB cause you to not consider a Russian adoption? No. In part three of this series, I'm going to look at what to do check for tuberculosis.

This Series:
Part One: Tuberculosis Scare?
Part Two: The State Of Tuberculosis In Russia Now
Part Three: Commonsense Advice On Tuberculosis

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