Tripoli Six update

[lederhosen]

Via Pharyngula, more on the Tripoli Six, the medical personnel who've been made into scapegoats for an epidemic of HIV and Hep C among Libyan children.

A recent publication in Nature confirms their innocence:

We find that the HIV-1 and HCV strains were already circulating and prevalent in this hospital and its environs before the arrival in March 1998 of the foreign medical staff (five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor) who stand accused of transmitting the HIV strain to the children...

We found that, irrespective of which model was used, the estimated date of the most common recent ancestor for each cluster pre-dated March 1998, sometimes by many years.

Comments

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Orchestrated hysteria, at that. This is happening because the Libyan government needs a scapegoat to take the blame for malpractice within their own health system. IIRC Gaddafi has also made some "make diplomatic concessions to us and we might reconsider" noises, but he may have overestimated how much of a damn the world gives about these people :-(