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I was looking at some photolisting of kids in Eastern Europe and I saw a boy with a spot on his nose. I thought at first it was a defect in the photo, since so many of those Eastern European photos are of poor quality.
I enlarged the picture and saw the spot was a red splotch. I concluded that the boy had skinned that part of his nose on the playground.
But now I've gone through more and more Eastern European photolistings I see a lot of kids have those red splotches.
What on earth are they? Rashes? Birthmarks?
Probably some are rashes, some are birthmarks, and some are from playground accidents. I know my daughter from Saratov, Russia, has a vascular birthmark called a hemangioma (often called a "strawberry birthmark"), which actually is a pretty common thing for Caucasian children anywhere, not just Russia. But when I got some video taken of her by another American family that had travelled to her orphanage to adopt their child, I saw that she had some red spots on her face that were not present in the previous photos I had seen of her. The pediatrician here looking at the video said it looked like eczema, which is also something that could occur anywhere, from dry skin. They crank the heat up pretty high in the rooms the kids are in (I've heard that if you travel there in winter, you'll be wishing you could open the window). So the air may be pretty dry as a result.
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