Word: rumania
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...sickening and terrifying. In crib after crib lie babies and toddlers who look like old people, their skin shriveled, their skeletal faces bearing the unmistakable mark of approaching death. These pitiful children at a clinic in Bucharest are AIDS patients, the tiniest victims of the brutal, backward regime of Rumania's fallen dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu...
Last week Western doctors working in Rumania revealed a mysterious epidemic of AIDS among the country's youngsters. The full extent of the outbreak is not yet known, but continuing tests of sick children at hospitals and orphanages have identified 706 who are infected out of 2,184 examined so far. Scores have already died. "It is worse than anything I have seen," said Dr. Jacques Lebas, president of the Paris-based medical-relief organization Medecins du Monde, which helped conduct the tests...
Until last year, Ceausescu's government considered AIDS a capitalist disease that hardly existed in Rumania. But the dictator had raised the odds that it would become a problem by outlawing birth control and sex education -- two mainstays of AIDS-prevention efforts elsewhere in the world -- in an attempt to boost his country's population. In January 1989, Dr. Ionel Patrascu, of Bucharest's Stefan S. Nicolau Institute of Virology, decided to test a handful of patients for the virus as part of a research project. Amazingly, the first child screened, a twelve-year-old girl, was infected...
...researchers now have two theories about how the disease spread. The first suspect is a traditional medical practice in Rumania of injecting minute quantities of adult blood into young babies who look thin or anemic. Part of this blood supply, some of which is imported, could have been contaminated. The other likely pathway for infection is the reuse of dirty needles. As in most East European countries, disposable syringes are in short supply, and hospital staff members are often poorly trained in sterilizing techniques...
...that trial, engineered by the ruling National Salvation Front as a means of officially burying the Ceausescu regime, instead symbolized how Ceausescu's legacy may yet poison Rumania's future. When a huge mob stormed the Front's headquarters last week shouting "Out with the Communists!," they were voicing the growing fear that the Front's leaders, who are almost all ex- lieutenants of Ceausescu's, may have renounced the dictator but not his methods. Now fledgling opposition parties to the Front are asking why it has mounted a Ceausescu-style show trial and why, if Ceausescu's old cronies...