Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - Friday December 8, 2000

Siboni, 6, lined up with Nhlanhle, 7 and Wellisile, 8, in matching blue and red training suits, greeted her shyly as she left an AIDS research unit and gave her a red rose.

She kissed him on both cheeks after highlighting U.S. efforts to fight AIDS and trying to destigmatise a virus few of its 4.2 million carriers in South Africa admit to having.

"I was very pleased to be able to meet with the new mothers and say hello to some of the little children who are about the same size as my grandchildren. I feel that the work being done here is very important," Albright told reporters.

After visiting a U.S.-funded perinatal unit which researches mother-to-child transmission, she said the United States wanted to do all it could to help deal with "this dread disease that has killed more people in Africa than the wars."

Albright told health workers at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in this sprawling black township next to Johannesburg that she had met representatives of U.S. drugs companies before she left for Africa to try to get them to be more proactive. "It's certainly a message that I will take back," she added.

World number one drug firm Pfizer signed an unprecedented deal with South Africa on December 1 for the free supply of its AIDS drug Diflucan for an initial two-year period.

German firm Boehringer Ingelheim also said South Africa's medicines authority had given conditional approval for the use of its nevirapine (Viramune) drug to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV-AIDS.

Women Scared To Talk Of Aids

Later in Pretoria, Albright met President Thabo Mbeki, who has provoked international condemnation by questioning the causal link between HIV and AIDS and denying the use of antiretroviral drugs such as AZT on cost and safety grounds.

In Soweto, she met HIV positive mothers. A quarter of pregnant women are HIV positive and 5,000 babies are born with the virus each month in South Africa.

Female HIV carriers sometimes face violence from men if they admit having it, and enabling people to talk about it is seen as an important step toward preventing further spread of the virus, which affects about a tenth of the population.

"I'm too scared," said Sibonngile, 32, when asked if she had told her husband she was HIV positive.

Mabel, 21, sat beside her holding her friend's nine-month-old son Simphiwe, spared the virus they both carry thanks to the perinatal research unit.

"We are afraid they will tell other people," said Mabel. Both women spoke on condition their surnames would not be used. "Find a cure," said Mabel when asked how people could help.

Unlike inhabitants of rich Western nations, these women currently do not have access to the kind of drug treatment which has made AIDS manageable for many sufferers elsewhere, though at the Soweto clinic, some of the women said they had access to treatment through research programs.

One myth believed by some African men is that having sex with a virgin rids a sufferer of the virus.

This and high rates of rape and sexual abuse make HIV even more rampant, said Nomfundo Walaza of the Trauma Center for Survivors of Violence and Torture, who met Albright earlier in Cape Town.

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