Juan Maeso
Spanish anaesthetist sentenced to 1,933 years in prison for infecting hundreds of patients with hepatitis C

Juan Maeso Vélez (1942 – 31 March 2026) was a Spanish anaesthetist who was sentenced to 1,933 years in prison for infecting hundreds of patients with hepatitis C, after using the same needles to give both himself and the patients opioids.
Maeso infected 275 people between 1988 and 1997. He was sentenced to 1,933 years in prison, but the most he could serve under Spanish law was 20 years. Maeso was ordered to pay 500,000 euros (US$680,000) to each victim or their survivors.
He was released from prison in 2023, after 15 years of imprisonment, due to his medical condition.
Maeso died at a hospital on 31 March 2026, at the age of 84.
The public source identifies “Juan Maeso” as spanish anaesthetist sentenced to 1,933 years in prison for infecting hundreds of patients with hepatitis C. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Juan, Maeso and Spanish.
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This entry incorporates text from “Juan Maeso” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.