Mariam Al-Sugayer Okaz/Saudi Gazette RIYADH – The family of Reham Al-Hakami, the 13-year-old Saudi girl who was given HIV-tainted blood at Jazan General Hospital in February, expressed doubts over the reliability of medical reports which showed negative results. The lawyer who represents Reham's family in the ongoing legal battle demanded the Ministry of Health (MoH) and Riyadh's King Faisal Specialist Hospital where she received treatment to publish the findings of medical tests. Referring to the ordeal that Reham's family went through since the botched transfusion, her maternal aunt told Okaz/Saudi Gazette: “Though the period was six months and 16 days, we had intense mixed feelings of passing through worries, anxieties and anticipations of 60 years. My niece suffered a lot and that brought her maturity much earlier, and became more rationale,” she said. The aunt said that Reham has still worries and she keeps asking whether her classmates would believe that she is fully cured when she rejoins school in Jazan. Referring to the case seeking compensation, she said: “My personal opinion is that nothing can compensate the ordeal that Reham and family had experienced. The stamp of AIDS that was labeled on her would linger in the minds of the public who will never believe that she was fully cured, and that will affect adversely not only her future life but also her interaction with friends and relatives.” Reham's lawyer said that the family is seeking compensation for the physical and mental harm suffered by the girl due to the grave medical error. “Even a declaration about her full recovery would not erase its harmful effect,” he said. Dr. Khaled Marghalani, spokesman of MoH, said that the issue is now in the court. Sami Al-Hajjar, the doctor who treated Reham, asked her family to take the girl back home as she is “free from the disease.” He said that the family can take her to anywhere in the world to carry out specialized tests if they have any doubts about her full recovery. The doctor asked Reham's family to bring her for routine checkup at an interval of every six months. Marghalani said that the medical reports that confirmed that Reham is free from AIDS showed that the rapid curative intervention by the medical team specialized in contagious diseases within 24 hours after she was given the tainted blood proved crucial. Reports from advanced laboratories in the US, Canada and other countries to which samples of Reham's blood were sent for intensive checks have confirmed that the girl is safe as there was no evidence so far to believe that she has contracted the virus. The latest research, published in March this year by Dr. J. Cohen in the University of Navarra, Spain, suggests that the issues with producing an HIV cure fall back on latent infections; while a cure may be synthesized in subsets of the patient's CD4 cells. As far as cures go, Andy Coghlan of NewScientist has found that a recent claim of 14 adult patients cured of HIV were refuted after traces of the virus were found in their blood.
