tuberculosis

Ebola isn't the first dangerous microbe to spur calls for quarantine in American cities. But as New York City's experience with drug-resistant tuberculosis suggests, isolation isn't always best.

One Siberian city is tackling the problem of drug-resistant tuberculosis with a health program affectionately named for an earlier Russian innovation. In the modern Sputnik program, teams of nurses travel around the sprawling city of Tomsk, finding and treating the TB patients who are the hardest to reach.

A family copes with tuberculosis in a place where a child infected with the illness may be shunned. Nurses are working hard to bring clean air and clear information to every home and every generation.

New types of tuberculosis are emerging around the world that take years and thousands of dollars to cure. Patients fighting this disease are often isolated from their communities and suffer devastating drug side effects, such as permanent hearing loss and dizziness.

Oxana and Pavel Rucsineanu fell in love while living in a Moldovan hospital's tuberculosis ward. Now, several years later, Oxana has recovered, and she and the couple's new baby live in an apartment. But Pavel's infection has evolved into a deadly form of TB, which keeps him from joining his new son and wife.

Tuberculosis is much less of a health threat in the United States than it is in other countries. But a family in Boston discovered that even here, no one is immune from this ancient foe. More than a dozen family members were infected with TB, and matriarch Judy Williams died at age 59.