Putin Problems

WITH ALL THE FINANCIAL HOO-HA recently, plus Stevie and the Goppers, it's easy to lose sight of other people's problems.

According to Murray Feshbach in the Washington Post, Mr. Putin has a whole panoply, especially health-related. Why should you care? A country with this kind of health problem has no future, and a country with no future can become unstable.

According to U.N. figures, the average life expectancy for a Russian man is 59 years -- putting the country at about 166th place in the world longevity sweepstakes, one notch above Gambia. For women, the picture is somewhat rosier: They can expect to live, on average, 73 years, barely beating out the Moldovans. But there are still some 126 countries where they could expect to live longer. And the gap between expected longevity for men and for women -- 14 years -- is the largest in the developed world.

And then there's tuberculosis -- remember tuberculosis? In the United States, with a population of 303 million, 650 people died of the disease in 2007. In Russia, which has a total of 142 million people, an astonishing 24,000 of them died of tuberculosis in 2007