Six medics fight for their life in Libyan re-trial as another child dies of AIDS

Oct 30 2006

The death of a nine-year old girl from AIDS in Libya brings the death toll to 52 of children in a Benghazi hospital who were allegedly deliberately infected with the virus by six foreign medics.

Libyan authorities have accused five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor of the crime and the case which has now been going on for more than seven years, shows no sign of being resolved.

The six were originally found guilty and sentenced to death by firing squad in 2004, but an uproar by Bulgaria, the EU and the USA, which questioned their guilt, forced a retrial which has dragged on amid endless adjournments; the next hearing is due to take place on 31st October.

The health workers maintain their innocence and say early confessions were extracted under torture and this claim has considerable backing from a range of sources.

They also have the support of world experts on HIV/AIDS who say the children became infected because of inadequate hygiene standards at the children's hospital in Benghazi, where the virus was present before the children became infected.

Libyan prosecutors however continue to maintain the children were infected on purpose by the health workers and the doctor.

The EU has sent medical teams to Libya to train health professionals to treat HIV/AIDS infected children, but as many of the children continue to be sent to Europe for treatment that is an indication that local treatments are still inadequate and the training of health care professionals was not effective.

In the last month almost 400 of them have been sent to hospitals in Italy and France for treatment, which has been funded by the Libyan government.

As many as 145 children are being treated at a Vatican-owned hospital in Rome.

Experts say Libya's health system does not have the resources to screen blood and blood products before transfusions, and this is the most likely source of the infection of the children and is probably still infecting new people.

During the prosecution of the six medics Libyan authorities have staunchly declared their health system to be both clean and efficient, but Italian doctors currently treating some of the children say their treatment in Libya was poor.

The international medical community has been vociferous in it's condemnation of the Libyan claims and both American and European researchers have published their views in prestigious medical journals and say the evidence against the six is worthless and no credible evidence exists specifically linking the workers to these specific infections.

The defendants could still face the death penalty when their trial ends on October 31, but the plethora of evidence from international scientists which shows that the six are innocent, has been rejected by the Libyan court.

Some of that evidence comes from one of the scientists who first discovered the AIDS virus, Luc Montagnier of France, who says based on analysis of blood samples taken from many of the HIV-infected Libyan children when they were treated in European hospitals, some of the children had been infected before the arrival of the workers.

Montagnier also says that many of the Libyan children were also infected with hepatitis B and C, which suggests that unsafe practices were common in the Libyan hospital.

The Libyan court however has accepted a report by five Libyan physicians which implicates the foreign health workers in the HIV cases, which basically says that the HIV outbreak involved so many children and was of an unusual strain, that it must have been malicious.

Many experts believe the Libyan government has brought the trumped up charges against the six to cover up medical deficiencies in the Benghazi hospital.