AIDS deliberately in Libya

Six medical workers — five nurses from Bulgaria and a Palestinian doctor — were charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with the virus that causes AIDS.
Consideration of solid evidence is something the medical workers need badly. They were arrested in 1999, after an outbreak of HIV in more than 400 children at the Al-Fateh hospital in Benghazi; more than 50 of them have since died. The medical workers were initially charged with deliberately injecting the children as part of a plot by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Those charges were then dropped, with prosecutors now claiming that the medical workers used the children as guinea pigs to test a therapy in an illicit clinical trial.

In the midst of such spy-novel overtones, scientists have worked to inject credible evidence into the case. For instance, Vittorio Colizzi, an AIDS researcher at Tor Vergata University in Rome, Italy, testified at the medical workers' first trial along with Luc Montagnier, whose group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered HIV. The scientists presented evidence that the infections were accidental, the result of a lack of safety precautions at the hospital. Other researchers, including Luc Perrin of the Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland, had reached the same conclusions independently. But the court threw their arguments out, on the basis that an investigation by Libyan doctors had reached the opposite conclusion.

For Colizzi, the stakes go beyond the death penalties. He fears that blaming the medical workers is part of wider denial of AIDS by Libya, which has a large population of migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa who have HIV. Libya and many countries also need to face up to the problem of hospital-borne diseases and to introduce safe healthcare programmes, he adds.

The initial phylogenetic analyses of the sequences confirmed epidemiological evidence that the infection had started at the hospital before the medical workers had started working there. As the retrial drew to a close, the researchers worked night and day to finish their analyses, suspending all other uses of their 40-processor cluster supercomputer to dedicate it solely to analysis of the Libyan sequences.