Health-e spent more than two weeks organising a trip to the Free State to investigate the effect of the moratorium and what measures the provincial Health Department was making to remedy the situation. Initially, the department gave us permission to visit four health facilities. But the permission was withdrawn at the last minute by the Executive Manager for Strategic Health Programs, Moeder Khokho. She cited the ‘€œhuge backlog of patients needing AIDS treatment that health care workers had to attend to’€ as the reason. But an interview we had requested with the head of the provincial health department still remained in the offing. Prof. Pax Ramela re-assured us that the moratorium on ARV treatment for new AIDS patients has been lifted.

‘€œNo, we have.   No, no, no, no. We have started taking up patients. About 500. Five-hundred-and-fifty-six patients’€, said Ramela convincingly.

His Senior Manager for the HIV and AIDS and STIs unit, Portia Shai-Mahtu, added that ‘€œwe have put on 500 patients on treatment in February. That’€™s the global picture of the Free State. We started late in February’€.

But civil society organisations who have recorded complaints of patients turned back empty-handed from the Free State’€™s 28 accredited ARV facilities have yet to hear confirmation of this from patients.

‘€œWe cannot say whatever that they are saying is really happening because right now we still have people who are experiencing this shortage of drugs and who cannot access them’€, said the provincial TAC spokesperson, Sello Mokhaliphi.

‘€œWe are talking about people who have been on the waiting list from last year and their CD 4 counts have been taken already. The problem is those people have not received ARVs even today. We need to see our people receiving their treatment at the moment’€, added Sechaba Mafata, Community Development Facilitator for the National Association Living with HIV and AIDS (NAPWA).

Comments from a nurse affiliated to the National Education Health and Allied Workers’€™ Union (NEHAWU) support the assertions of civil society organisations that the moratorium only appears to have been lifted on paper.      

‘€œAs I’€™m working there, I can clearly say: No. That is not what is happening, especially now. At the moment there are no medications. A lot of the medications are not available, especially the ARVS. If I have to talk as a provincial HIV coordinator of NEHAWU, there are many comrades that I see at the union, whom after we have tested, we refer to the clinics.

They cannot start HAART treatment because the clinics say there are no drugs. Personally, there are some other facilities that I contacted, like MUCPP. They say:   ‘€˜No, they don’€™t have’€™, so they ‘€˜have to return them’€™ (the patients)’€, said midwife, Masego Makatane, who works in the maternity section of Pelonomi Hospital.