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A shot in the dark
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335 PAGES

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By James B. Stewart

Sept. 2, 1999 | Keneas Mzezewa had dozed off for a nap that May afternoon, but was awakened at about two p.m. when he felt someone removing his loose-fitting pajama trousers. He lifted his head, still a bit groggy from sleep, and saw that it was Dr. Mike. The handsome American doctor had a syringe in his hand, and seemed about to give him an injection, so Mzezewa, eager to help, pulled down his trousers and turned on his side. Then the doctor plunged the unusually large needle into his right buttock. Mzezewa saw that after he finished the injection, the doctor concealed the used syringe in the pocket of his white medical coat.

"Good-bye," Dr. Mike said softly, pausing briefly to look back at Mzezewa. Then he left the hospital ward.

Also Today A shot in the dark Hospitals are perfect settings for serial killers -- there are drugs everywhere and doctors don't police doctors. "Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away With Murder" A throrough investigation tells a hair-raising story but doesn't go far enough in its indictment of the medical profession.

Howard Mpofu, the director of hospitals for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Zimbabwe, liked the new doctor the minute he met him, in November 1994, when he picked him up at the Bulawayo city airport. Michael Swango looked like the American athletes Mpofu had seen on television. He was blond and blue-eyed, taller than Mpofu, with a ready smile. According to the résumé the church had received, he was forty years old, but he looked younger. Mpofu tried to help Swango with his duffel bags, but the doctor wouldn't hear of it. He quickly hoisted the heavy bags and insisted on carrying them to the car himself.

On the ride into the city, Swango was garrulous, flushed with excitement at his new assignment. Mpofu asked why Swango had wanted to come to Zimbabwe to take up a post that would pay him a small fraction of what he could earn in the United States. After all, Swango was an honor student; he'd graduated from an American medical school and had completed an internship at the prestigious Ohio State University Hospitals, which meant he could go anywhere. "All my life," Swango told him, "I have dreamed of helping the poor and the disadvantaged." He said America had plenty of doctors, but in Africa, he would be truly needed. Mpofu couldn't argue with that.

When they reached the Lutheran church headquarters in central Bulawayo, they walked up one flight of stairs to the church offices, and Mpofu introduced Swango to the Lutheran bishop of Zimbabwe. To the amazement of the church officials, Swango knelt before the bishop and kissed the floor. He said he was so grateful to have been hired and to be in Zimbabwe at last.

The bishop seemed equally delighted. Indeed, he and Mpofu were overjoyed simply to have succeeded in recruiting an American doctor for one of their mission hospitals, let alone one willing to kiss the ground at their feet. Before Swango, the only European or American doctors the church had succeeded in bringing to Zimbabwe were Evangelical Lutherans from church headquarters in Sweden, and none of them stayed more than a few years.

Next page | With mounting alarm, he realized that he couldn't turn over and couldn't move his arms or legs