Three weeks ago, I posted on the legal proceedings in the prosecution of medical personnel having been finished – you can read the original over at Kazakh HIV Case Completed.
Now close to fifty doctors (who were not charged with anything) have resigned from their positions, as a protest at the pressure being placed upon them and their colleagues since the court case.
Another thirteen doctors are being investigated by the prosecution team and legal authorities for their roles in the infection of more than 120 young children. The doctors’ union have stated that more professionals will be resigning unless the government changes its reaction and edicts to the situation. They also state that individual doctors should not be shouldering the blame for the state of the healthcare system in this country.
Meanwhile, parents of the children infected, ten of whom have already sadly died, are also unhappy, as the higher placed officials have mostly received suspended sentences, and of the doctors who were sent to prison, many will be able to continue practicing medicine on their release.
Jul 26 2007
Kazakh Doctors Resign En Masse
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Jul 02 2007
Kazakh HIV Case Completed
More positive news to follow, but this recently caught my eye over at the BBC web site.
21 people from Shymkent, involved in the medical profession, have been found guilty of producing an HIV outbreak. This incident has so far been known to take the lives of 10 children, with another 110 infected. The case was that these workers, through negligence, fraud and bad medical practice, needlessly engineered situations where patients received un-necessary treatments. As blood was used in transfusions that had not been properly screened, infected samples were used, and so patients were put in extremely high risks. Just as often, medical apparatus was not properly cleaned between procedures, so infections from previous blood supplies were carried over to the next batch.
Some have commented that is not very surprising that the ex-head of the regional health department and her deputies only received suspended sentences.