This is a piece of news that’s not outsourcing-related. Since it made CNN’s frontpage, however, it’s impossible to ignore.
Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were pardoned by President Georgi Parvanov upon their arrival in Sofia on Tuesday after spending eight-and-a-half years in prison in Libya.
The six medics, who were sentenced to life in prison for allegedly contaminating children with the AIDS virus, arrived on board a French presidential plane with French first lady Cecilia Sarkozy and the EU’s commissioner for foreign affairs, Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
The group was immediately greeted by a delegation of government officials and family members.
“I waited so long for this moment,” nurse Snezhana Dimitrova said before falling into the arms of her loved ones, The Associated Press reported.
“This is the result of very tough and long negotiations … between the European Union and Libyan authorities,” Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin said. “It has been a long discussion and debate with Libya until we reached this agreement.”
I just heard on the news that the nurses and the doctor who conveniently received Bulgarian citizenship were all pardoned by the Bulgarian president.
The facts remain that 400 and more children got infected with HIV in the hospital where the accused worked and trying to convince the public that their infection was the result of poor hygienic conditions is pure nonsense because those nurses and doctor were sent there as skilled professionals to guard exactly against that kind of situation.
I could understand if one child or even two had gotten infected by accident, but 400 infected children all by “accident” and negligence goes against all logic.
Let me just say that if such a thing would happen to even a single person in a western coutry hospital, the doctor or nurse responsible, if only for negligence, would face severe consequences.
Granting full pardon and walking away free from such a charge is the biggest disgrace and the deepest low that human hypocrisy can sink into. Lately it seems to me that doctors are no longer taking the Hippocratic Oath, but a “Hypocritical Oath”.
Hi Boris, obviously I don’t want to go into an argument as to who did what when…
However, if you do read the CNN article I linked(which should be free from bias), you’ll go to the following paragraph:
The children were infected through transfusions. During the trial of the nurses, a French scientist testified that poor hygiene at the hospital likely led to the contamination of the blood used in the transfusions.
He said the contamination dated to 1997 — two years before the Bulgarians were hired to work in Libya.