To die or be dead in the news

[Comments on the baby dying in the hospital removed because I was commenting on a different issue...nevermind!]

Regarding the nurses in Lybia. According to Nature, all scientific evidence shows the nurses are innocent. From the article:

In 1998, outbreaks of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection were reported in children attending Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi, Libya. Here we use molecular phylogenetic techniques to analyse new virus sequences from these outbreaks. We find that the HIV-1 and HCV strains were already circulating and prevalent in this hospital and its environs before the arrival in March 1998 of the foreign medical staff (five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor) who stand accused of transmitting the HIV strain to the children.

And from a related article:

an international team led by researchers from Oxford and Rome used the genetic sequences of the viruses isolated from the patients to reconstruct the exact phylogeny, or 'family tree', of the outbreak. Analysing the mutations that accumulated over time allowed the researchers to work out when different outbreaks occurred. They showed that the strain of HIV with which the children had been infected was already present and spreading locally in the mid-1990s, long before the medics arrived in Libya in 1998...

There was already a body of scientific evidence indicating that the outbreak was caused not by deliberate transmission, but by poor hygiene at the Al-Fateh hospital in Benghazi, where the outbreak took place (see Nature 443, 888–889; 2006). Analysis of hospital records suggested that the outbreak began before the medics arrived. And almost half of the HIV-infected children were also infected with hepatitis B or C, pointing to poor hospital practices as the cause.

The new results provide independent genetic confirmation of these findings.

but, i feel more and more strongly about having birth wards separate from hospitals and have most of them tended by midwives with doctors on call.

birth is not a disease and ought not to be treated as such. i feel babies and mothers are more at risk at hospitals than even in unattended home birth situations.

My preference? Clinics like the now defunct Elizabeth Seton Center (on 14th Street), with at least 20 birthing rooms, a doctor on staff and a facility/ability to perform outpatient surgery (ie: sewing up any vaginal tearing).

Hospitals should be only for the ill.