Nurses branded killers

MBABANE - Swaziland’s commemoration of the World AIDS Day was tainted as reports of a study into HIV in the country circulated with shocking allegati-ons. It is alleged that one in five children who are infected with HIV got it from the negligence of medical staff.

This is carried in a study in the International Journal of STD and HIV published by the British Association of Sexual Health and HIV, an affiliate organisation to the Royal Society of Medicine, which looked at rates of HIV infection among children in Swazil and.
It alleges that their findings state that the children became HIV-positive because Swazi medical staff gave them injections with contaminated needles.

The injections were given to them often unnecessary.
It claims to have used data from the Swaziland Demographic and Health Survey and the authors of the research found that one in five Swazi children aged two to 12 who are infected with the virus have HIV-negative mothers.  
 “These children had experienced many more medical injections and vaccinations than their uninfected brothers or sis-       ters. Most of these related to anti-malaria health programmes.

“Africans are subject to a much higher proportion of injections and blood tests than patients in the West, according to a 1999 study for the World Health Organisation,” reads the report also published in the Telegraph newspaper in Britain.
That research found that a wide range of common symptoms such as colds, ear infections, fatigue and tonsillitis were treated with injections rather than oral medication.

The study concluded that at least 50 per cent of these were unsafe, with needles being used repeatedly on one patient after another, without sterilisation.
“HIV priorities have been and continue to be misplaced,” the paper quotes Stuart Brody, a professor at the University of the West of Scotland, in Paisley, who has researched the spread of HIV in Kenya through tetanus vaccinati- ons.

The Minister of Health Benedict Xaba and his Principal Secretary were called numerous times yesterday but their phones were not answered by the time of compiling this report in the evening.
They were both called from 4pm to 7.30pm

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