Two representatives of the "AIDS generation" have demanded that the Romanian state officially recognise its responsibility for the infection of several thousand children contaminated with the HIV virus between 1988 and 1992. Adevărul tells the story of the two young people, now aged 21 and 22, whose lives were devastated by "the mixture of medical incompetence, indifference and a lack of appropriate resources" which characterised the Romanian health-care system after the fall of communism. The daily explains that "the Romanian phenomenon," as it was dubbed in the foreign press at the time, notably affected newborns who were vaccinated "en masse" with the same syringe, and childcare centres that administered micro-transfusions to counter the effects of malnutrition.