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Libya: 426 Children Purposely Infected with HIV?

21:04 / 06.05.04

So I read this on CNN.com this morning, and was absolutely horrified. Apparently, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor have been sentenced to death for purposely infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV-tainted blood products.

According to the article, Amnesty International and the EU have criticized the case, claiming that poor hygiene in the hospital could have led to the infections, and that confessions were extracted through torture.

That being said, my mind is boggled by even the thought that it would occur to someone to infect unwitting human beings with fatal illnesses in order to experiment with cures.

I don't really know what to think about this case. On the one hand, as stated in the AI article above, eight Libyan doctors accused of the same crime were acquitted: Is this just a case of the Libyan government trying to excuse their own culpability in maintaining a shoddy system by blaming and executing foreign nationals? Or is there something more insidious at work, something more along the lines of the Tuskegee Study, but in the Third World.

Thoughts, resources?

21:33 / 06.05.04

Sounds a bit "Babies Thrown Out Of Incubators!" to me.

02:12 / 07.05.04

Well, I can't think of any reason why they would have wanted to infect babies with AIDS. Plenty of kids with AIDS in Africa, if you wanted to study them. I'm imagining that it's more to do with an inadequately-checked blood supply myself.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

11:53 / 07.05.04

Is there a political angle we're not seeing here, does Libya have any specific beef with Bulgaria and Palestine at the moment, or is this just that they had to blame someone for failings in their health service?

12:54 / 07.05.04

Yeah, Our Lady, that's what I was wondering. I'm not naive enough to think that, just because the nurses were convicted that they're necessarily guilty. I just don't see what Libya would have to gain from causing an international incident if nothing happened.

15:29 / 07.05.04

In this day and age we know how AIDS is spread. If the actual cause is "poor medical hygiene" they killed those children. That means they would have knowingly double used needles, used blood products they did not know to be safe, or just put the children in a place where their open wounds could have contact with blood. It's not like they used dirty silverware. They probably shouldn't be excecuted but they did kill those children who they were trying to save.

16:40 / 07.05.04

I'm not letting that one go. They probably shouldn't be executed? No-one should be executed.