A group of actors in conjunction with the AIDS organisation, Wola Nani, are volunteering their time to run workshops that use the Boal forum theatre technique to inform and equip people with HIVAIDS to understand their rights and to act upon them. By involving the audience in the play to the extent that they re-enact parts of the drama, participants are empowered to change the tone and content so that they are able to practise asserting their interests and concerns.

Sadly, it would seem, that many healthworkers serving in clinics and hospitals around South Africa stigmatise and ridicule people with HIV/AIDS. When one woman in the Western Cape spoke out about it at a meeting recently, the room resounded with echoes of similar stories. Sue Valentine reports. [This feature was first broadast on “AM Live” on SAfm on Thursday March 1, 2001. Speaking on the programme immediately after this report was played, a spokesperson for G F Jooste Hospital denied that staff at his institution discriminated against people with HIV/AIDS. On the contrary, he said, his staff were trained to deal with patients sympathetically and with kindness.]

This week in our regular feature, spy-master novelist John le Carre shares his thoughts on the pharmaceutical industry and we meet a South African who’s gained access to medication through volunteering for drug trials.

One of the world’€™s pharmarceutical giants, Pfizer, was a notable absentee among the litigants represented by the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’€™ Association when they took the South African government to court this week.

The impact of HIV/AIDS on all aspects of South African society is hampering even the best efforts to improve the health status of the country and overall the country’€™s health status remains poor.

HIV/AIDS will have a massive and long term impact on South African society. In the rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal, extended families are already absorbing the consequences of what it means when both parents die. In this report, we meet Rose Vumase, a 64-year grandmother who lives in Manguzi, near the Mozambique border and we hear from economist, Alan Whiteside, director of the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at the University of Natal, Durban.

More than a thousand people applauded religious leaders when they urged government to see to the health care needs of its people at an inter-faith service in St George’s cathedral in Cape Town last week (Feb 12). The crowd then joined a march to Parliament organised by the Treatment Action Campaign calling for an HIV/AIDS treatment plan by June 16 and for trade and industry minister Alec Erwin to use his powers under the Patents Act to licence the necessary anti-retrovirals for a treatment plan. Sue Valentine followed the march through Cape Town and spoke to its leaders.

It stands to reason that if something affects you, you’re more likely to take an interest in understanding it. Treatment literacy – the process of understanding how a disease affects you and what medication works best – is still relatively undeveloped in South Africa. In the United States, however, AIDS activists have not been content to leave the research into AIDS drugs in the hallo wed halls of scientific institutions. The Treatment Action Group based in New York has made substantial progress in ensuring that safe and effective medicines reach the people living with HIV/AIDS as fast as possible.

Living in denial about HIV/AIDS is not good for your mental or physical health. Three people with HIV/AIDS talk about living with the disease. Linda Sambata, Pholokgolo Ramothwala and Sindiswa Godwana all say that the more they learn about the virus and how to look after themselves, the better they feel about their lives.

2000 was a year all too often fraught with confusion, anger and frustration for those people living with HIV/AIDS. But as we head into the new year, what are people who have the HI virus hoping for? Sue Valentine compiled this report.

Steve Andrews has seen too many patients die of opportunistic infections related to HIV/AIDS that could have been prevented if the drugs were affordable. He respects the right of pharmaceutical companies to make a profit, but in the case of Fluconazole believes that it borders on the criminal not to make the medicine available. That’s why he is importing the approved generic, Biozole, in defiance of Pfizer’s patent on the drug in South Africa.