The more I read about this, the worse it gets. In addition to the links I mentioned yesterday, Laurie Garrett mentioned she's been covering this for years. One example is this piece from this past June.
One of the newly charged Bulgarians, Smilian Tachev, an engineer, told Bulgarian journalists last month that he was originally arrested in Benghazi at the same time as the nurses and doctor, and during 174 days of captivity witnessed gruesome torture of the health care workers. "The nurses were beaten with many-stranded wire, for a long time and painfully," Tachev said. "Then they were made to run, crawl, stand on one leg with their hands stretched up. When they collapsed totally, they were dragged somewhere and brought back in a helpless state." Tachev witnessed the use of probes to force unidentified objects down the women's throats, electrocution, and dogs loosed on the screaming victims.
Garrett notes that this type of behavior has the potential to have a chilling effect on foreign doctors working in underserved countries:
It is hard enough to create viable incentives to draw American and European doctors and nurses toward service in Africa. Adding the risk of torture and execution amid fallacious charges of deliberately spreading disease only worsens an already dire situation: The World Health Organization estimates the world is now short of four million health care workers, with Africa suffering a deficit of one million.
Mike Dunford has amassed a great list of contact information here, so if you've not sent out a letter, I urge you to take just a few minutes and shoot one off.
Comments
If the purveyors of the AIDS curse would stop causing such a panic about nothing and shoving "you're gonna die" dogma down the throat of the world, maybe feckless states wouldn't be so FREAKED out about HIV that they imagine people purposely infecting others.
But you all mean well, I'm sure. My Dad had a pearl of wisdom, and he said it often: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Go team!
Don't get me started on how the American president has set a soul-less and diabolical example for the rest of the world. We saw how Israel was emboldened to terrorize Lebanon, civilian lives be damned.
Posted by: AIDS shmaids! | September 28, 2006 4:58 PM
So if y'all are so convinced HIV doesn't cause AIDS and even if they *did* inject these children it was with a harmless virus, why aren't more of *you* out there protesting this? Why isn't this lighting up the denial blogs?
Posted by: Tara C. Smith | September 29, 2006 9:46 AM