Last week, I took a look at a new study about why alcoholism is killing Russian men. But Russia is also grappling with another big medical problem, and there's been a surprising amount of reporting on it in the last week: HIV.

The human immunodeficiency virus, as most people know, causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. The World Health Organization has estimated that more than 25 million people around the world have died of AIDS since it was identified in 1981.

The United Nations puts the incidence of AIDS in Russia at between 1% and 5% of the adult population. That's higher than the United States, with a rate of 0.5% to 1%, but far, far less than most nations of sub-Saharan Africa.

Early this week, César Chelala, an international public health consultant and the author of a book about the AIDS epidemic, published an op-ed piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer about AIDS and children who are being abandoned. According to Chelala, the children left with hospitals by HIV-infected mothers are being held in isolation in the hospitals and not put into mainstream orphanage care. How big a problem is this? Chelala says that 21,000 babies have been born to HIV-positive mothers in Russia, and about 1,500 have been abandoned, or just over 7%.

I don’t know Chelala, and I wish he had identified the source of his statistics. And I also don't know about his claim that Russia's response to its AIDS epidemic is "inadequate". In April 2006, President Vladimir Putin spoke very openly about the disease and pledged to combat certain avenues for infection. In March 2007, the St. Petersburg Times ran a story about a key hospital in the city opening up a center for HIV-positive people and their relatives to combat their isolation and stigmas about the disease. Still, citing a doctor at an infectious disease hospital, it said that only five HIV-positive children have been adopted since Russia began requiring registration by those affected by the disease 19 yeas ago--all but one by foreigners.

In a separate report this week, the French newswire Agence France Presse said that the number of HIV/AIDS cases in Russia's North Caucasus region is rising with "terrifying speed." Citing information from a government-run HIV outreach center in Rostov-on-Don, it says the number of HIV cases has doubled in Chechnya to 13.2 cases per 100,000 people in 2006 from 6.6 cases per 100,000 people in 2003. The French report says that in Dagestan, HIV cases have jumped to to 8.7 cases per 100,000 people from 1.9 cases per 100,000 people over the same period.

Should you be concerned about the child you are planning to adopt? War-torn Chechnya is not an option for adoptions right now. Ditto Dagestan. A good adoption agency will ask you if you are open to accepting a referral for a baby that has been exposed to HIV or is HIV positive. And even in a blind referral region, you can ask questions about the birth mother's drug usage.