This week the Financial Times is running its global health outlook section, and the journalist Miriam Elder (whom you may know from Moscow Times and PostGlobal) has probably the most unique and hard-hitting report:  a first person account from a Moscow doctor who contracts tuberculosis, one of Russia’s deadliest pandemics. 

According to USAID, Russia ranks 12th on the list of 22 high-burden tuberculosis countries in the world, claiming the lives of 288,250 people between 1998-2007.  In late August, the Washington Post reported on the increased spread of new strains of drug-resistant TB in Russia, sped along by government missteps and causing infection levels in the Far East of the country to rise above three times the epidemic classification from the United Nations.

This FT report hits close to home for us, following the state’s treatment of the former Yukos general counsel Vasily Alexanyan.