Oct 16, 2006
HIV death sentence
Aside from write-ups in the New York Times and the journal Nature, there has been very little in the media recently concerning the plight of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who face death sentences in Libya. The six are charged with deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV, the AIDS virus, in 1998. The charges are nothing more than “preposterous” says the NYT, given that infections appeared before these medics began work at the hospital in question! The NYT suggests that this “looming miscarriage of justice demands a strong warning to the Libyan leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, that his efforts to join the ranks of peaceable nations will suffer if the medical workers are made the scapegoats for the failure of Libya’s own health system.” The evidence points to wholly inadequate hygiene as being to blame rather than the accused individuals.
Nature reported in September that defence lawyers working for the six medical workers have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics’ innocence. We should expect nothing less, yet there has apparently been no outcry, no figurative call to arms among biomedical scientists outraged by this state of affairs. Conversely, almost 80,000 people have registered an interest in hearing the results of the Steorn Challenge and dozens of scientists have been called on to help the company validate its findings of new form of energy production. If such a publicity campaign and dozens of reports across the blogosphere can raise such momentum regarding what appears to be a perpetual motion machine, then surely scientists and bloggers across the world can be drawn to this far more critical scientific cause.
The six medics were arrested in 1999. Confessions were wrought from each of them under torture according to human rights organisations, but the individuals later retracted their statements. It seems to be beyond doubt that the six are not guilty yet they have been under a death sentence since 2004. Nature suggests that the silence of scientists over this case is due to a hope that diplomacy might resolve the issue. After all, the NYT reports, the White House currently has Libya on a pedestal as an ideal state that no longer abides weapons of mass destruction.
However, should the firing squads raises arms against those six medics, without a fair, scientifically based trial, then Libya’s position on that pedestal will come crashing down just as quickly as if it were yet another rogue state harbouring WMD.
Fellow science blogger and journalist Declan Butler, who alerted me to this state of affairs, points out that AAAS and other scientific bodies have begun to respond. The Nature leaders on this are available as pdfs - Libya1 and Libya2.
About David Bradley
Sciencebase FAQ
Click to contact me
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
Add me on StumbleUpon
Poke me on Facebook
MyBlogLog Profile
View my Flickr photos
Pownce Page
Tumblr Newspage
BloggingZoom
Network with me on LinkedIn
Shout me on Digg
del.icio.us ne.ws
Andrew Sun said,
October 17, 2006 at 6:26 am
You are so productive Dave! How to be a successful scientific writer?
Andrew Sun said,
October 17, 2006 at 10:33 am
I think the first side to blame is the Libya government rather than scientists from the rest of the world. The scapegoats making, esp. those made with absurd reasons, oftentimes implies some real murderers are under protection. To save the innocents it is inevitable that the real criminals be found out. Diplomacy can do less on developing countries as the global situation growing into 21st century, the recent case of North Korea typifying this trend. Leaders of these countries don’t judge their rightness by whether the States or the EU gives ‘a red-carpet treatments’ to them (Nature 443, 245-246). Something more practical should be done, wisely, if our goal is JUST saving the innocents.
Declan Butler said,
October 18, 2006 at 7:26 pm
Andrew
Rest assured that much practical is being attempted.. See http://declanbutler.info/blog/ for recent actions, and a resource page for help with actions that can be taken: http://declanbutler.info/blog/libya.htm
And this is a message I received from Emmanuel Altit, the head of the international defence team: “This is exactly what we, the international lawyers of the five Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian medic need: strong support from the media, scientists, politicians, heads of companies, communities and international public opinion. We need to raise public awareness in order to put the Libyan Authorities under pressure and thereby change the balance of power.”
sciencebase said,
November 4, 2006 at 11:04 am
Declan Butler just emailed to alert me to a new development in this case.
More than one hundred Nobel laureates have written to Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi to express their concern over the death-penalty case of five Bulgarian nurses, and a Palestinian doctor, accused of deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV in 1998.
The letter will be published online this week in Nature. The 114 laureates affirm the need to ensure a fair trial, and for the appropriate authorities to permit evidence from internationally recognized AIDS experts to be used in this case. It notes that: “Strong scientific evidence is needed to establish the cause of this infection. However, independent science-based evidence from international experts has so far not been permitted in court.”