Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - Sunday October 21, 2001
Bobby Jordan

But before the HIV-positive baby dies, she will have become the champion of thousands of other children who have contracted HIV/Aids from their mothers.

This week young Tinashe and her teenage mother Sibongile stepped into the front line of the battle to force the state to provide anti-Aids drugs to pregnant women.

Her mother announced she was suing for R700 000 damages and to buy drugs to keep Tinashe alive.

The child contracted the disease because, it is alleged, her 19-year-old mother was not given a R30 dose of a drug that could have prevented it.

If successful, the case could force state policy to change and ensure that all pregnant women are given free access to the drug, nevirapine.

Meanwhile, Tinashe and Sibongile are unlikely advocates for the estimated 100 000 children who are born HIV-positive every year in South Africa. (The family, fearing prejudice, have asked that their full names not be published.)

Living in a sprawling settlement outside Nelspruit and relying on handouts from relatives and pensioners, the two are already showing signs of the disease, relatives say.

"Tinashe's cheeks were all swollen and red yesterday," said her grandmother Veronica, cradling the baby.

Tinashe was born HIV-positive in April in the Rob Ferreira provincial hospital in Nelspruit. Sibongile was infected at the age of 14 when she was gang-raped.

She says hospital staff at Rob Ferreira failed to tell her that medicine costing only R30 could have halved her chance of infecting her baby. She didn't know that the medicine is available free at some hospitals.

But it is unavailable to most South Africans after the government turned down an offer from a manufacturer to supply the treatment in bulk.

Sibongile's doctor at a private clinic in the Msogwaba trust area said people with her level of infection could deteriorate quickly.

"In her case it's sad - she lost [her] medical aid and these tests are not cheap," said Dr Eugene Magerman. "The irony is I could do more tests here than are available at the hospitals where they just don't have the facilities. Our healthcare support system is pathetic."

Richard Spoor, the lawyer acting for Tinashe and Sibongile, believes that even with drugs Tinashe will at best live to be 15, by when she would have spent months in hospital at a cost of R8 000 a year.

"As far as we have been able to ascertain, there is a conscious and deliberate decision not to inform women about these [anti-Aids] drugs or to recommend them.

"There is no excuse for their failure to advise and help Sibongile and Tinashe. By their inaction they are liable in terms of the law," Spoor alleged.

A letter of demand has been sent to the Mpumalanga MEC for Health, Sibongile Manana.

A spokesman, Dumisani Mlangeni, said Manana had received the letter but would not comment until she had studied it.

Manana made headlines last year when she tried to evict a nonprofit organisation that was providing anti-Aids drugs to rape victims at the Rob Ferreira hospital. She said providing anti-Aids drugs contravened government policy.

This week 19-year-old Sibongile said doctors and nurses had kept silent about Aids even though 25% of pregnant women in her area are HIV-positive.

"While I was in hospital my mother told one of the doctors that I was HIV-positive and said that she was worried about the child becoming infected. The doctor told my mother there was nothing that could be done. I had no reason to doubt the doctor's advice," she said.

Veronica said: "Why can't we be helped? It is because we are poor. Without money a person is just like a frog."

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