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Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American for the seven days starting August 27, 2008. I'm Steve Murski. Tuberculosis isn't back because it never really

goes away. We have a series of web articles up this week about the savage rise of TB in a multi-drug-resistant form in Russia. They were written by veteran journalist Merrill Goosner. He was the chief Asia correspondent and chief economics correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. He's now the director of the Integrity and Science Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. I called him at his office in Washington, D.C. Hi, Merrill. Great to talk to you today.

Pleasure to be with you. This is an incredibly ambitious package that we have up on the website

that you've pretty much done in its entirety. First, tell us what were you doing in Siberia?

Well, I was asked to go there by Scientific American as part of a sort of a plan tour

that had been put together by some nonprofit organizations that wanted to show off their efforts over

the last decade in improving the way tuberculosis in general and in particular drug-resistant

tuberculosis, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, was being treated in a corner ofia, where they thought it was a good model

for what could be done around the world.

Now, of course, you know, there was several journalists on the trip, a scientific American

paid for the whole trip, but that's what took me out there.

I had been a foreign correspondent in the past when I was working for the Chicago Tribune

and hadn't been in Russia since 1992.

And even then, it was in the far-Russian Far East.

So it was interesting to return to the country almost two decades later and see the remarkable

economic changes that had been underway, but also many of the social

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