No Place to Turn
‘I’LL WAIT FOR THE END’: Mikhail Lychmanyuk gathers firewood at his home near Karabash. Doctors told him that his heart was failing, but he cant afford the $5,000 operation. (Sergei L. Loiko / LAT)
‘NO ONE IN THIS TOWN ISN’T SICK’: The Karabash copper smelter. Nowhere is the healthcare crisis more pronounced than in Karabash and other poisoned cities of the Soviet-era industrial belt. (Sergei L. Loiko / LAT)
DEATHLY ILL: When the hospital couldnt treat Anatoly Fomins lung cancer, his sister brought him home to die in Karabash. He had to sleep on a metal bed frame: She had to have the mattress removed because the room lacked running water to keep him clean, she said. (Sergei L. Loiko / LAT)
MOST POLLUTED PLACE ON EARTH: A legacy of chemical and heavy metal emissions and radiation leaks, including one worse that Chernobyl, earned the Karabash region a reputation in the 1990s as the most polluted spot on Earth (Sergei L. Loiko / LAT)
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EPIDEMIC: A tuberculosis patient is wheeled through a hall of the Phthisio-Pulmonary Institute in Moscow. Russia is seeing at least 120,000 new tuberculosis cases a year. (Sergei L. Loiko / LAT)
‘LET’S WATCH HIM DIE HERE’: A Moscow doctor examines cancer patient Anzor Magomadov, 3, in Russia’s Health Ministry Children’s Hospital in Moscow where he was admitted only when in sheer desperation his mother put her son on the desk in the chief doctor’s office. (Sergei L. Loiko / LAT)
CONSTANT PAIN: Birlant Dokayeva and her son Askhab, 2, in Grozny, Chechnya. Askhab was born healthy but later had a seizure and went into a coma. He is partially paralyzed, and doctors dont know why. The family says one doctor suggested putting him to sleep. (Sergei L. Loiko / LAT)
