His nostrils are still locked in the drawers .. The full story of AIDS in Iraq

Ali al-Rashedi-Baghdad

For example, instead of being a cure for an illness, it is misused, unsafe, or contracted with a global pharmaceutical company without having samples of those drugs checked for quality control, it will inevitably harm your users.

This is the contract signed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health in the 1980s with the French company Mario for the supply of Vaccater 8 and Pacter 9, which work on blood clotting for hemophilia patients.

Blood contaminated
In 1986, a group of hemophilia patients entered hospitals in Baghdad for French treatment, which was imported by the Ministry of Health from Mario, the producer of the vaccines, but soon their injuries became AIDS, and they began to die one by one.

It turned out that the shipment sent by the French company was loaded with HIV-infected blood. In the same year, Iraq recorded the first case of the disease, at a time when it did not have any program to treat the disease, and the infection was spread among patients who were transfused with contaminated blood.

In a statement to Al-Jazeera Net, Salih al-Hasnawi, the former Iraqi health minister, said that the vaccines issued by this company infected 286 people with AIDS. The Iraqi government then blinded them through their detention at Al-Tuwaitha Hospital, southeast of Baghdad, for more than 10 years. The disease, some of them committed suicide and others were psychotic.

"The government has been silent on this issue and has declared through the media that Iraq is free of AIDS," he said. "The country has recorded the first case of the disease in its history.

This case caused a scandal that shook France and overthrew political leaders, including French Parliament Speaker Laurent Fabius and two former ministers convicted in 1999 before the Court of Justice in Paris.

Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Jordan, Portugal, Greece and Argentina, which imported the vaccines, compensated and received financial compensation of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The French company announced after payment of compensation to the affected countries, and bought another called Sanofi Pasteur.

Late negotiations
But Iraq, according to al-Hasnawi, did not file a lawsuit at the time, nor did he announce that he imported medicines from the company, which is HIV-positive, but after 2003 the case was raised and the president of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society took this file with the consent of the government, Who survived and those affected and went to Paris to negotiate compensation, but to no avail.

In 2009, Hasnawi revealed the formation of a government committee at the request of the Ministry of Health, including representatives of the ministry and legal representatives of the Secretariat of the Council of Ministers, and went to France and met with the company, but it turned out that all contracts with the French company in this regard was destroyed before 2003 , And the company asked the Iraqi Commission to provide evidence that the Iraqi infected with AIDS was due to the use of drugs issued in 1986.

In contrast, the Iraqi Commission, according to Hasnawi, said that "winning the case through the courts is difficult." But it was not over. The issue was again raised by civil society forces in France. They came to Iraq and collected information about But did not produce any results.

Parliamentary move
Today, 33 years later, the Committee on Health and Environment in the Iraqi parliament to reopen the file, "the French virus" received in Iraq, and find a formula for a solution that could benefit the families of those affected by them.

But activists and relatives asked whether the committee would lose its resolve as its predecessors, keep the file hidden in the drawers and sit on the shelves to restore Iraqi rights, and whether there would be remedies to combat a spread virus after Iraq was a low-epidemic country for AIDS, according to the World Health Organization.