Policy Wise

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Recently, Libiya had released Belgian doctors accused of deliberately infecting Libyan children with HIV. While the rest of the world has largely been skeptical of Libyan claims, largely due to its political leadership, Harriet A Washington points out why these fears are well founded,

Africa has harbored a number of high-profile Western medical miscreants who have intentionally administered deadly agents under the guise of providing health care or conducting research. In March 2000, Werner Bezwoda, a cancer researcher at South Africa’s Witwatersrand University, was fired after conducting medical experiments involving very high doses of chemotherapy on black breast-cancer patients, possibly without their knowledge or consent. In Zimbabwe, in 1995, Richard McGown, a Scottish anesthesiologist, was accused of five murders and convicted in the deaths of two infant patients whom he injected with lethal doses of morphine. And Dr. Michael Swango, ultimately convicted of murder after pleading guilty to killing three American patients with lethal injections of potassium, is suspected of causing the deaths of 60 other people, many of them in Zimbabwe and Zambia during the 1980s and ’90s. (Swango was never tried on the African charges.)[link]

And the result is a double tragedy for Africa,

The distrust of Western medical workers has had direct consequences. Since 2003, for example, polio has been on the rise in Nigeria, Chad and Burkina Faso because many people avoid vaccinations, believing that the vaccines are contaminated with HIV or are actually sterilization agents in disguise. This would sound incredible were it not that scientists working for Basson’s Project Coast reported that one of their chief goals was to find ways to selectively and secretly sterilize Africans.

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