This article from the Independent is part of a series that recalls some of the paper's biggest stories in history. It revists a report from February 1990 that shone light on the situation of children in orphanages in Romania and the high rate of HIV infection among them.
Independent journalist Oliver Gillie travelled to Bucharest in January 1990 and was horrified by what he saw: hundreds of children chained to their cots, unlikely to survive the year, in what was the largest outbreak of non-inherited AIDS among children anywhere in the world. The cause was thought to have been dirty needles used in immunisation, or blood transfusions.