|
AIDS:
A multifaceted South African crisis (continued)
|
|
|
Every Thursday morning Gray hears the voices of HIV positive mothers, three rows deep filling her waiting area with prayers in Sesotho and Zulu. They come to Gray's office for their children's weekly check ups. On this particular Thursday, two of the sixteen women will find out if the AZT regimen they took while pregnant was successful. As they wait they sing in English "thank God for the days of my life." The women must wait until their children are at least a year old before they will know for sure what their youngsters' status is. This day, Julia Phali and her twins sit in Gray's office -- singing and waiting. Phali will not find out for another two weeks whether or not she passed the virus on to her 13 month old son, Lehlohonolo and daughter, Lerato. Nonetheless, she is hopeful. "We are healthy," Phali says. And she is grateful to have been a part of the Petra study. "It's important to get AZT as a single mother. I don't know who is going to be caring for my children. If AZT is there maybe they will be older so they won't have so long to go without a parent," Phali says. For Gray the hardest part of her job is dealing with "children who get infected when their mother's have tried so hard." "They have done everything by the book and their children still get infected," Gray says. Similela, herself an OB/GYN, still stays focused on the larger picture. "One needs to understand that the provision of AZT doesn't just start and then it's over. There are a lot of things that go with interventions like that. Every pregnant woman must be tested," Similela says. The government must provide pre-counseling and post counseling on a national level Similela adds. "You've got to provide breast milk substitutes for the women. You've got to provide bottles, clean water, energy to boil the water. So all of these logistics have to be looked at if you are to have an intervention of that nature. And what the government is saying is that at this point in time, the infrastructure is not there." Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Capetown and Head of the Neonatal Medical Unit at Groote Schoor hospital, David Woods sees both sides. He agrees with Similela that a lack of infrastructure makes it unfeasible to create service programs like the Petra research study for the entire country. "That problem is almost insurmountable. To get a program like that in this place would cost millions of rand," Woods says, "You can't buy the answer with money. You can only do it with development." However, he does not think this bleak outlook gives the government cause to throw up its hands in defeat. "The problem is so huge it's easier to pretend it's not there," Woods says, "so what we need is a compromise." "I don't think there is one magic answer for the whole country," Woods says. "The compromise is a different answer for urban people and a different answer for rural people," Woods says, "This is not politically correct because of the problem of equity. In the ANC manifesto, equity is terribly important, but we all know equity is an ideal. It's not a reality and the only way to have equity is to bring everything down to the lowest common denominator which basically just destroys the whole country." |
|