On April 29, 2022, the scientific news website PCR.NEWS posted the publication “Mongolia avoided the epidemic of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis characteristic of Russia.” Researchers from Irkutsk and St. Petersburg assessed the likelihood of a common origin of tuberculosis strains in Mongolia and Eastern Siberia and the degree of cross-border transmission of these strains.
One of the co-authors of the article, head of laboratory at St. Petersburg Pasteur Institute, Dr Igor Mokrousov notes that cross-border transmission of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains between Mongolia and its neighbors has been and remains negligible. This is the key reasons why the multidrug resistant TB (MDR-TB) epidemic in Russia have not affected the TB situation in Mongolia.
The Soviet military and civilian presence in Mongolia prior to 1990 was significant. During the Second World War, there were 50,000 Soviet troops in Mongolia, from 1966 to 1991 - 100,000. During the construction of the Trans-Mongolian Railway in the 1950s, 60,000 Soviet prisoners worked in the GULAG railway department, and 80,000 in the Mongolian department of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, most Russian military and civilian employees were withdrawn from Mongolia, and bilateral migration flows since the 1990s reduced. According to Igor Mokrousov, the results of this study emphasize both the isolating role of state borders and the limited contacts of Russian/Soviet citizens with the population of Mongolia in the second half of the 20th century. Another explanation for the non-spread of Russian epidemic strains in Mongolia could be differences in human genetics.
The article was published in the Transboundary and Emerging Diseases. This journal is published by Wiley, has Impact factor 5.0 and ranks 2nd in the Veterinary Medicine category (Web of Science).
Source: Zhdanova S., Mokrousov I., Orlova E., Sinkov V., Ogarkov O. Transborder molecular analysis of drug-resistant tuberculosis in Mongolia and Eastern Siberia, Russia // Transboundary and Emerging Diseases. 2022. DOI: 10.1111/tbed.14515.