Our new friend Libya

[Bozo Erectus]

Forget it Sharpe, youre too far gone if you dont realise how ridiculous what you just said is.

 

[Stile]

How does "poor hygiene" translate into 400+ children infected with HIV? I thought HIV couldn't live outside the human body (for long anyway). How could it not be intentional by someone? Maybe it's not the nurses and doctor who were convicted, but there ought to be some sort of answer other than dirty toilet seats.

 

[Evertonian]

From the article it looks like the nurses are not guilty of anything. However suppose they are guilty? It sounds like a pretty serious crime to me, the mass murder of hundreds of young children.

Now I don't support the death penalty, so I don't think they should be shot, but very many countries to have the death penalty and the west is OK with it.

 

[amadeus]

Originally posted by Dumb pothead
Forget it Sharpe, youre too far gone if you dont realise how ridiculous what you just said is.

You mean there aren't people out there with hate and malice?

I guess Saddam's human shredders and the Iraqi prisoner humiliation never really happened then.

 

[Bozo Erectus]

Are you people f**kin' nuts? I cant believe this. I feel like Im in a Twilight Zone episode. You're willing to believe Khaddafi when he says that a group of Bulgarian nurses went to Libya to infect children with AIDs? Ok let me explain it for you numbskulls:

If a hospital doesnt adhere to basic practices like using new needles, properly cleaning instruments, one or two people with AIDS can end up infecting hundreds of people.

Jesus Christ! You people are scary

 

[The Yankee]

I can't believe people looked at Qaddafi in a brand new light because he's opening up his international stance.

 

[Civrules]

I'm from Bulgaria and I will side with the truth. Problem is, I donno what the truth is.

CNN makes it sound that the Bulgarian nurses did it on purpose, while the Washington Post claims the opposite.

I gotta tell you. The TV media is sometimes equivalent to BS.

Here is what the Washington Post had to say:

Libya Condemns Foreign 'AIDS Plot' Medics to Death

Reuters
Thursday, May 6, 2004; 2:53 PM


By Salah Sarrar

BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - A Libyan court sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor on Thursday to death by firing squad after convicting them of deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with the deadly HIV virus.

Bulgaria condemned the verdicts announced by court officials as "unfair and absurd" and was joined in outrage by its Western partners -- the European Union and the United States.

The issue is a major hurdle to Libya joining an EU economic partnership with Mediterranean region countries.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who is seeking closer ties with the West after more than a decade of international isolation, had promised to swiftly resolve the dispute during a ground-breaking visit to EU headquarters in Brussels last week.

The condemned, detained in February 1999, were convicted of infecting 426 Libyan children at a Benghazi hospital with blood products contaminated with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

They had pleaded not guilty, insisting the epidemic Tripoli says has killed more than 40 children since 1999 started before they began work at the hospital.

Prosecutors charged them with "uncontrollable murder aimed at destabilising the country, deliberately starting an epidemic...and conspiring to intentionally infect children with the AIDS virus."

In 2001 Gaddafi said the children were infected as part of an experiment ordered by the U.S. or Israeli secret services.

EU aspirant Bulgaria has slammed the trial as unfair, saying there is no hard evidence except for confessions from two nurses who were held without council for a year before being indicted.

Nine Libyans have been on trial for torturing the confessions out of them.

Defense lawyers said they would appeal the sentences.

Zdravko Georgiev, a Bulgarian doctor and the husband of one of the nurses, was sentenced to four years in jail but was released on Thursday on time served.

"I'm not happy at the moment. I cannot feel free because I left behind six innocent people," Georgiev told Bulgarian TV after his release.

Scores of dancing and chanting relatives of the HIV-infected children took to the streets near the court in the Mediterranean port city after the verdicts were announced.

"The verdict is fair. What they did is a crime against humanity. They planted a bomb inside our children," said Ramdane Ali Mohamed, whose younger sister Hiba died of AIDS.

In Sofia, several hundred somber demonstrators staged a candle-light vigil for the condemned, aghast at the ruling.

"We are totally convinced they did not conspire to cause the epidemic. It's not possible for a normal person, let alone a nurse, to do such a thing," said pensioner Nina Taneva, 57.

The European Commission said it was "deeply disappointed" at the ruling. The State Department called it "unacceptable."

"We cannot accept these verdicts... We are not satisfied by the court's decision because it doesn't take into account the proof given by AIDS experts," Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy, on a visit in Washington, said in a statement.

The Balkan state's parliament speaker, Ognyan Gerdzhikov, said he was confident the sentences would not be carried out.

"First, they can be appealed. Secondly, Libya has not executed death sentences in nine years, and I'd be very surprised if they start now. Thirdly, I expect Gaddafi to act like a humanist to win certain political credit which he needs from world public opinion," he told national radio. Last year Luc Montagnier, the French doctor credited with first discovering the HIV virus, said the epidemic emerged in the Libyan hospital in 1997, a year before the medics arrived.

He testified that the children were most probably infected through negligence and poor hygiene.

Libyan Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdel-Rahman Shalgam, during a visit in Dublin, said he opposed the death penalty but could not interfere, an EU spokesman said.

Human rights watchdog agency Amnesty International denounced the verdicts in a statement: "We are shocked by the imposition of these death sentences and call for the Libyan authorities to immediately quash them." (Additional reporting by Tsvetelia Ilieva and Michael Winfrey in Sofia).

But whatever the truth, I accept it. If it is true, then killing and infecting that many children with AIDS on purpose is just sick...

I still donno...

 

[Civrules]

BTW, sorry I didn't make myself very clear. CNN basically says the same thing on cnn.com, but on TV, the news on the bottom of the screen have only so much information that you basically only get a piece of what really happened.

 

[h4ppy]

If the court finds them guilty then there is nothing the Bulgarians can do about it. And I'd prefere the death penalty to a Lybian prison by the way. (for those who were argueing that life in prison would be better)

 

[silver 2039]

If they really infected children on purpose they deserve nothing less than the death sentence.

 

[EzInKy]

Originally posted by Stile
How does "poor hygiene" translate into 400+ children infected with HIV? I thought HIV couldn't live outside the human body (for long anyway). How could it not be intentional by someone? Maybe it's not the nurses and doctor who were convicted, but there ought to be some sort of answer other than dirty toilet seats.

"Hygiene" includes steriliazation of medical instruments and proper disposal of blood and other bodily fluids. In the US, and I assume the rest of the devoloped world, we use disposable needles instead of reusable ones. For poorer countries disposable needles are just too expensive. Though the HIV is fragile, the idea that it doesn't survive at all outside the body is a myth.

Here is an excerpt from http://www.cdc.gov :

Scientists and medical authorities agree that HIV does not survive well outside the body, making the possibility of environmental transmission remote. HIV is found in varying concentrations or amounts in blood, semen, vaginal fluid, breast milk, saliva, and tears. To obtain data on the survival of HIV, laboratory studies have required the use of artificially high concentrations of laboratory-grown virus. Although these unnatural concentrations of HIV can be kept alive for days or even weeks under precisely controlled and limited laboratory conditions, CDC studies have shown that drying of even these high concentrations of HIV reduces the amount of infectious virus by 90 to 99 percent within several hours. Since the HIV concentrations used in laboratory studies are much higher than those actually found in blood or other specimens, drying of HIV-infected human blood or other body fluids reduces the theoretical risk of environmental transmission to that which has been observed - essentially zero. Incorrect interpretations of conclusions drawn from laboratory studies have in some instances caused unnecessary alarm.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Originally posted by h4ppy
If the court finds them guilty then there is nothing the Bulgarians can do about it.

They might convince their friends to be real obnoxious about it. The West's bullied Libya to give up the Lockerbie suspects, and it's looking like they're gonna cave in on the La Belle affair too, so it's not unlikely they can be blackmailed on this issue too.

 

[h4ppy]

If they're willing to kill innocent Pakistanis then they will be really pissed if we leave them high and dry. (I don't see why everyone is jumping on the U.S. bash here, I mean shouldn't others being doin stuff too? (E.U., friendly Arab nations, China/Russia ()))

 

[The Last Conformist]

I don't get the Pakistani reference; that was Macedonia, not?

I'm not seeing any "everyone" bashing the US here. If cosying up Qaddafi is a crime, I'd pin more blame on Mr Prodi than on Mr Bush.

 

[h4ppy]

I thought it was Bulgaria. Maybe I wrong. Oh well, same difference.

 

[Pointlessness]

Originally posted by EzInKy
Do you also proscribe to the theory that the best way to treat rapists is to reward them to stop raping?

What do you suggest? Should we apply sanctions to countries with human rights problems? Great idea, the people of Libya starve while the leaders still eat their expesive food, like they always do. Or we could ignore them, and Libya could continue doing what it was doing. We can only do so much to combat human rights violations. By opening diplomatic relations with a country, it is easier to persuade them to change. You would rather listen to a friend than an absolute strange, would you not? In recent events, Libya has shown the willingness to open up to the West, and we should use this oppurtunity to initiate change in Libya, rather than revert back to 20 years or so of fruitless shunning.

Besides, countries are very different from individual criminals. We can remove a rapist from society. We can not remove a country from the map, nor can we remove a dictator from power without military action or assassinations, both with immense consequences. International diplomacy is not that simple.

One last point. Even if opening up to Libya does not improve human rights, as least we could trade with Libya. This would improve both nations' economies. We would get oil, and remember, oil is not a bad thing.

 

[EzInKy]

Originally posted by Pointlessness

One last point. Even if opening up to Libya does not improve human rights, as least we could trade with Libya. This would improve both nations' economies. We would get oil, and remember, oil is not a bad thing.

Trading with despots who trample people's rights have similar effects to sanctions because it just gives the dictator more money to pay the henchman who carry out his orders. The only real answers are to take them out or wait for them to kick the bucket.

 

[greentea]

I thought it was Bulgaria. Maybe I wrong. Oh well, same difference.

Well, I must be very angry you make no difference between Bulgaria and Macedonia, but I will forgive that. After all, you are from the imperial power.
On the other hand, many Bulgarians (and some Macedonians) believe that Macedonia should be a part of Bulgaria, there's no Macedonian nation, and so on. It is true we are pretty close, Macedonian language can be called a dialect of Bulgarian. However, they are a different country. So, I would appreciate it, if you respect that.

 

[greentea]

They might convince their friends to be real obnoxious about it. The West's bullied Libya to give up the Lockerbie suspects, and it's looking like they're gonna cave in on the La Belle affair too, so it's not unlikely they can be blackmailed on this issue too.

I think Libya is the blackmailer in this case. Although, I can't see what they can win from such a situation.

 

[CurtSibling]

Among all the shrieks of condemnation - I am not seeing much talk about the HIV-infected children here?

Or do they not matter, when jingiostic chest-thumping is on the line?