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. It is a dangerous disease that still kills too many adults and children around the world every year. But the newsletter item and the underlying story don't accurately reflect either the report on which they were based or the current state of TB in Russia.

First the newsletter item itself. It was based on a report in The Canadian Press, the wire service that is Canada's equivalent of the BBC and normally very level-headed. The reporter had latched on to a study in the latest issue of the journal Pediatrics. The study's headline was "Predictors of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Infection in International Adoptees"; the Canadian Press story came out under "TB infections among international adoptees rising, screen on arrival: study". Quite a change in headline. Hmmm.

The study was, as its authors state at the outset, a retrospective review of the data on 880 international adoptees who were examined at the International Medicine Adoption program at the University of Minnesota. This is a well-respected outfit that has kept close tabs on the health and development of adoptees in its region. But here's the catch: The study looked at data collected between 1986 and 2001. The last data was from six years ago, and much of it was drawn from a period in which UNICEF acknowledges that immunization against TB or care for those infected with it, was not a priority for Russia.

The study's authors conclude that "the risk for tuberculosis transmission to children within orphanage settings consistently increased" during the period studied. It rose, dear reader, it rose. Past tense, not present as it is in those headlines. I called the Donaldson Institute to talk about the differences between the study and the newsletter item, but my call was not returned.

Is tuberculosis rising now among orphanage children? I'll get to that in part two.

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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