I’ve blogged a bit before about the Libyan HIV sequences that the government was trying to say were brought to Libya by European medics, despite the fact that the scientific evidence was strong that the sequences were there before the medics arrived and infections continued to occur after the medics were imprisoned.

I think it is really strange when strong scientific evidence is disregarded by establishments such as the legal system of a country.

It’s OK for scientists to cure cancer and infectious disease, but if they ever decide that they are going to try to influence peoples superstitions or their prejudices, then science and scientists are regarded as a bit mad. This kind of argument is seen most often in the creation debate and in the GM food debate. In both cases, people simply choose that the scientific evidence is nonsense and they have a much better explanation because they “just know” that scientists are wrong.

In Libya, the extreme of this kind of reasoning saw six innocent medics being incarcerated from 1999 to 2007.

Sad really. Any comments?