400 Infected with AIDS: crime or accident?

Good Day Mates. Skimming through Nature magazine, as I usually do every week, I ran across an editorial titled Lybia’s Travesty. The headline read “Six medical workers in Libya face execution. It is not too late for scientists to speak up on their behalf”. According to the article, five American nurses and a British doctor were detained in 1999 after charges of deliberately contaminating more than 400 children with the HIV virus. The group of medical workers is to be executed by firing squad later on this year. (245).

The Human Immunodefiency Virus, HIV, is an incurable virus that can be transmitted through the bloodstream by bodily liquids such as semen, tears or blood (It is practically impossible for it to be transmitted through Saliva). HIV is a common sexually transmitted disease but it can also be transmitted through the use of drugs (needles) and under extreme unhygienic circumstances where the blood of an infected person reaches the immune system of another’s.

I will not cast my opinion of whether I believe these medics are innocent or not, but I will defend the rights of the Libyan government to carry out a trial and punish them if their courts see it fit. However, I will criticize many of the points made by the author throughout this article as I see that he has no basis for what he is saying and at no point whatsoever does he provide scientific evidence of why he is so sure that these people are innocent. Furthermore, he twists this scientific issue into a political one and tries to blame the whole ordeal on the Libyan government.

In the beginning of the article the author states, “The international community and its leaders sit by, spectators of a farce of a trial, leaving a handful of dedicated volunteer humanitarian lawyers and scientists to try to secure their release.”(245). By calling this trial a “farce”, he is challenging the legitimacy of the Libyan judicial entity and its ability to bring this case into trial. He does not provides evidence to prove his point, and even if it turns out that these people are in fact innocent, that doesn’t take away the right of the Libyan government to try them and prosecute them if necessary. Bringing someone to trial for an alleged crime, however scandalous it may be is an international standard, and one that is very much used here in the United States.

Next, the author goes on to say that “Diplomacy has lamentably failed to deliver” (145), simply because the United States decided to return to regular diplomatic relations with the country of Libya this past August, without taking into account this trial. He also criticizes the European Union for welcoming the president to its summit in Brussels and says that the attitude of the EU and the US “is an affront to the basic democratic principles that the United States and the European Union espouse”. (145)

The problem with this statement, and in fact with every statement this author makes throughout the whole article, is that he does not provide evidence to support his arguments and assures the audience that these people are in fact innocent and that this whole ordeal is some sort of joke. Now I want this author to realize that diplomacy and internal judicial systems are two completely different things. If a person is caught within a country committing a crime, he is to abide by the punishable laws of that country and is to be tried in the place of the crime committed unless the crime itself takes place during a time of war or the government of the individual asks for extradition, in which case the last word rests on the government holding the trial. This government will have to decide if they wish to extradite the individual or simply judge them internally.

Well, if I were the government and 400 children in my country were suddenly infected by HIV and there were six suspects involved, I sure wouldn’t want anyone else holding trial for them but me. Could you imagine asking the United States to release their alleged terrorists so they could receive trial back home in Saudi Arabia or in some other country? Yeah right, I thought so.

Next, I will examine the next statement. “A previous assessment of the case by two prominent AIDS researchers, Luc Montagnier and Vittorio Colizzi, concluded that the charges are false, that the medics are innocent, and that the infections resulted from poor hygiene in Libya's hospitals.” (146).

As I mentioned in the earlier in this post, it is possible for HIV to be transmitted through extremely poor hygiene, but the author fails to state how these researchers obtained the conclusions regarding the sanity levels of the hospitals, as they don’t seem to have been present at the time of the incident or have traveled to the hospital following the occurrence. Nowhere does he explain how they reached that conclusion and jumps right into his own by saying that the medics are innocent because it was hygiene problem that had caused the infections. I think that if it were really a hygiene problem, it wouldn’t have taken them 400 patients to realize that something was wrong. Besides, it seems difficult for 400 children to catch a disease at the same time because of a hygiene issue, unless we are talking about little boys running around with syringes in their hand and sticking them into anyone that walks.

Going even further, lets suppose that the doctors in fact did not deliberately handed the virus to the children. They however, still have some responsibility, since they are the ones providing the health service. If you go to a doctor’s office and his chair is broken and his equipment dirty and dysfunctional, it is nobody’s fault but his own. These foreign medical workers probably had many years of schooling in the area of medicine, and know more than anyone else that one cannot treat a patient in a non-hygienic hospital where AIDS can be spread. Its true, not all the responsibility lies on them, but just the fact that they might be partially guilty definitely gives the right to the Libyan government to investigate these people and bring them to trial.

After assuming the complete innocence of these people, the author compares this case to one in which the organization “Lawyers without Borders — a volunteer organization that last year helped win the freedom of Amina Lawal, who had been sentenced to death in Nigeria for having a child outside marriage.” (146) The example has absolutely no relevance to the issue at hand, and it is not comparable since we aren’t talking about some violation or religious or moral values of the Nigerian society but rather the sudden infection of 400 children with the HIV virus.

To conclude, this author is trying to assure the audience of the innocence of these people without absolutely any scientific or documented proof. He tries to shift the issue from a scientific tragedy to a political maneuver by the Libyan government. People need to stop blaming every single incidence on politics and realize that not everyone out there is going eat whatever they are fed. Good day mates.

“Lybia's Travesty.” Nature Online Magazine. Volume 443 (September 2006): pages 245-246. EBSCO Host Research Databases. UNC- Chapel Hill. 13 February 2007.