Libyan court scraps nurses' HIV death sentences

Eugene

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Sun Dec-25-05 05:04 AM
Original message

Libyan court scraps nurses' HIV death sentences

Libyan court scraps nurses' HIV death sentences
Sun Dec 25, 2005 4:47 AM ET

By Salah Sarrar

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libya's Supreme Court on Sunday scrapped death sentences against five Bulgarian
nurses and a Palestinian doctor convicted of infecting children with the HIV virus, sending the case
back to a lower court for a retrial.

The six, in jail since 1999, had been sentenced to death by firing squad in a case that has become
a hurdle to Libya's efforts to improve ties with the West.

The Supreme Court ruling followed an agreement last week between Libya and Bulgaria to set up
a fund to help the families of the sick children.

<snip>

The five nurses and the doctor had been convicted of infecting 426 Libyan children with the HIV
virus in Benghazi.

They had said they were innocent and their confessions were extracted under torture. AIDS experts
have said the outbreak started before the nurses arrived and was probably caused by poor hygiene.

<snip>

Full article: http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-12-25T094721Z_01_FLE535218_RTRUKOC_0_US-BULGARIA-LIBYA.xml

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mtnester

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Sun Dec-25-05 07:02 AM
Response to Original message

1. Poor hygiene is now a cause of HIV infection?

If so, the CDC maybe ought to be scrambling...

Last I knew, according to our exposure control classes, it has to be direct body fluid contact..not microbial contact (like sneezing, etc) but blood to blood or seminal/vaginal to orifice contact involving fluids.

So many things sound wrong with this story..either HIV is spread differently than indicated, or these children were deliberately infected (and there are a LOT of them).

Still...something about this story bugs me.

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LisaL

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Sun Dec-25-05 07:53 AM
Response to Reply #1

2. Poor hygiene probably means they used the same

needle on everyone, didn't properly sterilize the needles, etc. Mass infections can and did happen in some countries.

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tavalon

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Sun Dec-25-05 07:58 AM
Response to Reply #2

3. Correct

that is absolutely what is meant there.

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LisaL

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Sun Dec-25-05 10:42 AM
Response to Reply #3

5. No good deed should go unpunished. It's very likely these

poor people are completely innocent.

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Orangeone

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Sun Dec-25-05 12:48 PM
Response to Reply #1

6. One point

the weird thing is Libya and North Africa has fewer HIV cases in the general population than the rest of Africa, so it makes it more unlikely that simple contamination was the cause. Unless the medical supplies were from Bulgaria?

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LisaL

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Sun Dec-25-05 12:54 PM
Response to Reply #6

7. You can have one person with HIV in the hospital. And that

one person can infect a huge number of people, if the needles aren't properly sterilized. It doesn't have much to do with the number of HIV cases in general population. Something like this had happened in Russia in early 1990th, one sailor came back from Africa (he was in the hospital there), infected his wife. Back then rate of HIV in Russia was extremely low. But the sailor's wife got pregnant, she was giving birth in the hospital, and fifty or so kids got infected with HIV. How did they do it? Probably used the same needles on every one, or didn't sterilize the needles properly.

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Spinzonner

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Sun Dec-25-05 08:56 AM
Response to Original message

4. Speaking of confessions extracted under torture

what is the Bush administrations position on these ?

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