A plea for justice for jailed medical workers.

In 2000-2001, reports began to surface of an HIV-1 outbreak in approximately 400 children who were hospitalized or treated as outpatients in the Al-Fateh Hospital, Benghazi, Libya. The Libyan government accused six medical workers (five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor) of intentionally infecting these children with HIV-1. The Libyan Head of State, Moammar Kadafi, speaking at the HIV/AIDS summit in Abuja, Nigeria in April 2001, stated that these children had been deliberately infected as part of a vast international conspiracy to destabilize his country. The six healthcare workers were imprisoned, tortured with electric shocks to extract “confessions,” tried in a Libyan court, convicted, and sentenced to death by firing squad. The resulting publicity caused the Benghazi pediatric HIV-1 outbreak to become the focus of international scientific efforts to understand how it occurred. The Benghazi Children’s Hospital was visited by international experts, and the records of infected children were compiled. Many of these children were treated in European hospitals, making it possible to obtain clinical specimens for virology studies. The examination of hospital records showed that without question, HIV-infected children were admitted to several wards of the Al Fateh Benghazi Children’s Hospital in 1997 and early 1998 (with some possibility that HIV-infected children were present in the hospital as early as 1994), before the arrival in Libya of the six accused. The results of serology studies (1) and viral genome sequencing (1, 2) established that the HIV-1 A Plea for Justice for Jailed Medical Workers Sunil K. Ahuja, Fernando Aiuti, Ben Berkhout, Peter Biberfeld, Dennis R. Burton, Vittorio Colizzi, Steven G. Deeks, Ronald C. Desrosiers, Manfred P. Dierich, Robert W. Doms, Michael Emerman, Robert C. Gallo,* Marc Girard, Warner C. Greene, James A. Hoxie, Eric Hunter, George Klein, Bette Korber, Daniel R. Kuritzkes, Michael M. Lederman, Michael H. Malim, Preston A. Marx, Joseph M. McCune, Andrew McMichael, Christopher Miller, Veronica Miller, Luc Montagnier, David C. Montefiori, John P. Moore, Douglas F. Nixon, Julie Overbaugh, C. David Pauza, Douglas D. Richman, Michael S. Saag, Quentin Sattentau, Robert T. Schooley, Robin Shattock, George M. Shaw, Mario Stevenson, Alexandra Trkola, Mark A.Wainberg, Robin A. Weiss, Steven Wolinsky, Jerome A. Zack University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, TX, USA. University of Rome “La Sapienza,” Rome, Italy. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Karolinska Hospital/Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA. University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Rome, Italy. University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA. Harvard Medical School, New England Primate Research Center, Southboro, MA, USA. Innsbruck Medical University, Innsbruck, Austria. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA. Institute of Human Virology, University of Maryland at Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA. Lyon, France. Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA. Penn Center for AIDS Research, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA. Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA, USA. Center for AIDS Research, Case Western Reserve University/University Hospitals of Cleveland, Cleveland, OH, USA. King’s College London School of Medicine, London, UK. Tulane National Primate Research Center, Covington, LA, USA. Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, John Radcliffe Hospital, Headington, Oxford, UK. California National Primate Research Center, University of California-Davis, Davis, CA, USA The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA. World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, Paris, France. Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA. Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY, USA. University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA. UAB Center for AIDS Research, Birmingham, AL, USA. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. University of London, London, UK. University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA. University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA. University Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. McGill University AIDS Centre, Montreal, Canada. University College London, London, UK. Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA. David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA