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Summary: Hospitals in southern Kyrgyzstan have accidentally infected another 70 children with the HIV/AIDS virus, Kyrgyz officials have said.
[6 February 2012] - Kyrgyzstan has been testing thousands of children in the south of the country for HIV/AIDS after it emerged that dozens had been infected in hospitals in the past decade because of poor hygiene, infected blood transfusions and the re-use of needles and other medical equipment. The AP news agency quoted the Kyrgyz ministry of health saying last week that it has so far tested 110,000 children in the area around the cities of Osh and Jalalabad and that it had found another 70 HIV positive children to add to the 200 cases already discovered. Several thousand more children need to be tested in the south of this rural, mountainous country. Six health officials are already in prison serving three years for the infections and another eight are waiting to stand trial but UNICEF, the United Nation’s children’s organisation, has said that the infections are a failure of the national health system rather than the fault of individual doctors or nurses. In December it warned Kyrgyz officials against conducting a witch hunt against individual health workers. “It may not be a failure of a particular doctor or nurse, but rather a failure of the healthcare system as a whole to provide hospitals with the essential equipment required to prevent transmission of HIV infection,” UNICEF said in a statement. “Placing all the responsibility on individual health care workers can only add to the ongoing tragedy and would further erode the trust between the patients and the health care system.” Kyrgyzstan is one of the poorest countries in Central Asia. In its latest data, the World Bank estimated that Kyrgyzstan spent $57 per person in 2009 on healthcare. Neighbouring Kazakhstan spent six times more per person and Britain spent an estimated $3,285 per person. Further Information: