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EALTH OFFICIALS NOTE PROGRESS IN
TB
FIGHT
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Officials of the Health Ministry, Justice
Ministry and the Red Cross Committee gath-
ered in the RIA Novosti news agency on
Monday to discuss the current situation with
tuberculosis in Russia and the measures the
authorities need to take to eventually defeat
the disease.
The situation regarding tuberculosis in
large Russian cities, such as Moscow and St
Petersburg, is relatively stable, chief phthisiatrician expert of the Rus-
sian Health Ministry, Mikhail Perelman, said. He added that the situa-
tion in the large cities was very decent compared to such regions as
the Urals, Siberia and the Far East as well as some districts in the
South Russia.
Perelman added, however, that the situation is complicated by the
fact that there are a lot of illegal immigrants living in Moscow and
many of them are TB infected. The situation with local residents of
Moscow and St. Petersburg may be good, but the
illegal
immigrants
are extremely difficult to check and therefore include in the statistics.
Still, in 2007 doctors diagnosed 2,123 foreign citizens with TB,
which is almost four times more than the number for 2006.
The head of the Central Tuberculosis Research Institute Vladislav
Yerohin said that homeless children — as well as children living in
the families of alcoholics and drug addicts — face the greatest risk of
TB infection.
In this group, the mortality rate amounts to 18 per 1,000 people,
which is many times higher than the average level for Russia (in 2007,
Russian doctors diagnosed 118,367 people with TB, which makes
83.2 cases per 10,000 of population).
Children of refugees and illegal migrants are also prone to very
high risk, the official said.
At the same time, both experts noted that the growing number of
people diagnosed with TB does not mean that the number of infected