The spread of HIV in South Africa

Oxfam intern Amy Merone shares her experiences of the impact of HIV on young people in South Africa.

Mzwandie and his siblings. A small boy in the township. Children from the township.

Mzwandie stood back from the other children who had come to greet me. They stroked my hair, pulled at my fingers and touched my toes. But Mzwandie just stood there. I walked over to the little boy who was wearing a baseball cap bearing the international aids ribbon symbol. "Nice cap," I say and smile. He pauses momentarily and then grins back at me. "Thank you. I am HIV."

Mzwandie is 14-years-old. He lives in the Orchard Township in the Western Cape in South Africa with his three siblings and mother. He contracted HIV through mother-to-baby transmission. He now lives on a cocktail of anti-retroviral drugs, which, as his home-based carer tells me, are keeping him alive.

Mzwandie’s story sadly isn’t unique. The Orchard Township is just outside De Doorns; a small town in the Hex Valley in the Western Cape where 15.4 per cent of pregnant women have HIV.

The Hex Valley is a wine growing region – every year, more than 23,000 seasonal workers, largely from the Eastern Cape, migrate to the region to become grape pickers. 28 per cent of pregnant women in the Eastern Cape have HIV, which means that as people spread across the country desperate to find work, so too does the HIV virus.

In the Hex Valley townships, the fear of discrimination and stigma is preventing many people from being tested for the virus. The clinic in De Doorns, which serves many people who are HIV positive, has little access to anti-retroviral treatments. Many of the home-based carers, who treat patients with HIV and other serious illnesses such as TB and cancer, travel long distances on foot for as little as £5 a day.

The HIV virus affects more women than men. Not only are more women HIV positive, but they also bare the brunt of the virus more than men do. They are expected to care for sick relatives, to generate a source of income for their families and are often forced to drop out of school at a young age and become the head of household. This shatters children’s hopes of achieving an education that could help to lift them out of poverty.

The children in the Orchards Township where I visited told me matter-of-factly that Wednesday evening was 'Mummy's Night', when many of the women are forced to have sex with men - in a desperate attempt to make a small amount of money to care for their children and families. Sadly this means that the HIV virus spreads rapidly.

One of the United Nation's eight Millennium Development Goals has pledged to combat the spread of HIV and other preventable diseases such as TB and Malaria by 2015. There are 43 million people currently living with the HIV virus in the world. Twenty five million of those people live in sub-Saharan Africa and of those only 1 per cent are on anti-retroviral treatments.

The HIV epidemic is devastating communities across the world. It fuels poverty as members of families who become infected are forced to give up work; resulting in no income and low productivity.

Poor health systems mean that few people have the access they so desperately need to anti-retroviral treatments, or to preventative methods such as contraception, while many health workers themselves are infected with the virus.

There needs to be an increased and continued effort by world leaders and governments to commit to seriously tackling the HIV epidemic that is destroying the lives of millions of people.

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