Tripoli six: Killing nurses

The daily Kos is worried about several Italian nurses threatened with death for spreading HIV via needles...accused of doing it deliberatly.

However, the dirty little secret is that a lot of HIV in Africa and in Eastern Europe was spread thru dirty needles and unscreened blood transusions.

It is NOT the simple reuse of needles, but the inability to resterilize them properly.

You can kill HIV with chlorox bleach...but in some areas of Africa, you simply don't have enough needles to use for all your injections. So you reuse them.

This is who it was done in our smaller African clinics 20 years ago.

For example, you fill an oldfashioned 10 cc glass syringe with Procaine penicillin. Everyone comes in gets a shot...broken arm? penicillin shot. coughing? Penicillin shot. Back pain? Penicillin shot. One syringe, ten shots. Then you wash out the syringe and needles, and sterilize them by boiling over a propane tank stove for 15 minutes...if you are really short of supplies, you simply refill and keep shooting.

Penicillin for broken arms is not as crazy as it sounds, since you could always identify where it hurt because of "muti cuts"...pain was treated by making shallow cuts and rubbing herbs in the cuts...leading to infected cuts.

And remember: Muti cuts and other scarification done by traditional healers who did not sterilize their knives...and often, local healers would include penicilin and vitamin B shots with their other treatments.

The good news is that unlike HepatitisB, HIV is not easily spread thru needles and blood...nevertheless, it may be ironic that the spread of HIV may have been made worse by modern medicine.

(link from Instapundit)