Leading medic resigns in Bahrain protest

Saturday, June 25, 2011 – Irish Examiner
Leading medic resigns in Bahrain protest
By Catherine Shanahan

Friday, June 24, 2011

Ireland – A LEADING medic has resigned his fellowship of the country’s largest postgraduate medical institution in protest at its failure to condemn the detention and torture of nurses and doctors in Bahrain.

Professor Eoin O’Brien, former president of the Irish Heart Foundation&, said he believes he is the first fellow to resign “in principle” from the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.

The professor of molecular pharmacology at the Conway Institute of Biomolecular & Biomedical Research in University College Dublin mailed his resignation on Wednesday.

Prof O’Brien said he had done so “because there comes a time when you have to stand up for moral issues and we cannot have doctors and nurses tortured in the course of duty”.

He said the situation in Bahrain where doctors and nurses treating pro-democracy supporters are being arrested, detained and tortured was likely to “go badly wrong” and that “the colleges — the RCPI and the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland (RCSI) — by keeping silent, will be almost complicit”. …more