❝ Muslim’s hospital bug snub
– The Sun, 4 February 2008
From the rumours of Jews poisoning the wells during the Black Death in the fourteenth century to scare stories of
homosexual men spreading HIV in the 1980s the pattern of aliens spreading disease is part of a long tradition. Now the same kind of
accusations are being flung at Muslims. Last October The Times claimed that Muslim medical students “are refusing to attend
lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases because they claim it offends their religious
beliefs.” This story stemmed from a British Medical Association statement warning the General Medical Council not to relax the
rules about opting out of parts of the course. When we approached the BMA, they told us the statement was based on anecdotal
evidence from one source, which they refused to reveal. A much more serious case came in February this year when
the Sun dramatically warned that “thousands of hospital patients are in danger of catching deadly superbugs because Muslim
medical students refuse to follow new hygiene rules.” The message from this Sun report was very serious indeed – that
thousands of patients who were attended by Muslim students risked catching a fatal disease as a result. The first piece of hard
evidence in the story came in the fifth paragraph, which stated that female students at Leicester University “had difficulty”
complying with a Department of Health directive that medical staff across the country should be “bare below the elbow” to stop infection.
We visited Leicester to determine whether Muslim students were in fact refusing to wash their hands and putting patients’ lives at risk. Not a single
doctor or member of staff we spoke to had come across any problems with hand-washing. Dr Paul Symonds, Reader and Consultant
Clinical Oncologist at Leicester University, told us: “I personally haven’t seen it. I know of no-one who says they’ve seen it, and I’ve
discussed it with our junior staff, nurses, colleagues, and everyone just looks blankly at me with blank incomprehension, what are you
talking about? … the issue has not arisen. We followed Muslim medical students on their ward rounds.
They were shocked by the stories in the press. Nabila Khan, a fourth year medical student, said, “It’s completely outrageous.
It’s not based on any facts. I don’t know where they got this information from. As a medical student myself I always roll up my
sleeves, and everyone that I know does. We’ve had no complaints, no-one’s ever said anything to me in the past about it, so I find
it ridiculous that all this stuff has been written in newspapers and things, and people have printed these stories without checking
them out first.” Ather Mirza, Leicester University’s press officer, told us that they were not even aware of the story until it
was splashed across the world’s media. He told us that after an investigation it emerged that “one student had asked a question about what the regulations were, she’d not objected to them, she just asked about them, this had got recorded and had spiralled in to a story about Muslim students being unhappy about the whole procedure. Well, that wasn’t the case at all.” As with many stories of this kind, there was a grain of truth. Some female Muslim students had indeed expressed reservations about the newly introduced Department of Health guidance, which stipulated that all doctors must be “bare below the elbow” – a phenomenon thrown up by a Freedom of Information Act request by the Sunday Telegraph journalist Julie Henry. But the highly inflammatory and insulting claim that Muslim students were putting thousands of patients’ lives at risk because they put their religious beliefs before patients’ safety was simply not backed up by the evidence.