Carol Snyman (32) wipes the tears from her cheeks. “They swear at you, they call you horrible names. It hurts me very much when they speak about us like this. These are my children and I love them.” Snyman’€™s family is the perfect example of why Tuberculosis is so rampant in this part of the country and even more specifically in Uitsig, a suburb typical of the poorest working class areas of Cape Town.

Yanelisa Ngqongwa is a 12-year old Grade 6 pupil at Mthawelanga Primary School, in Ekuphum’leni, a section of Khayelitsha township in the Western Cape. It’s a Thursday morning and she and a group of 14 other pupils are attending a workshop run by their teacher and a social worker from a child rights organisation Ilitha Labantu, on child abuse. Yanelisa is a vocal participant in the workshop. After a while, she stands up and tells the group that she is a rape survivor.

In a dramatic turnaround, the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government has withdrawn from government’€™s appeal today (1 March) against the court ruling compelling it to provide Nevirapine to pregnant HIV positive mothers — and has instead joined forces with government’€™s court opponent, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC).

There are no good reasons for delaying the gradual and phased expansion of prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) services in all provinces, a research report commissioned by the health department has revealed.But the report also highlights that given the difference in capacity and infrastructure, it is reasonable for provinces to expand the provision of PMTCT services at different speeds.

In a move that seems to have baffled even those close to her, Health minister Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has opted to lash out at Gauteng’s moves to expand the nevirapine programme that will see the distribution of the drug to thousands of HIV positive pregnant women in the province’s hospitals. The only possible explanation for her outburst comes from a lone voice in the health department who claims that she had been angered by the fact that she had read about Gauteng’s expansion plans in the media.

Although Finance Minister Trevor Manuel made no moves to make social income grants accessible to older children, over 60 organisations dedicated to addressing social security issues on behalf of South Africa’€™s millions of poor and vulnerable children welcomed the R20 increase in the child support grant, but hastened to add that it was still not enough.

Health minister Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang describes the problems faced when trying to expand the MTCT programme in all nine provinces. She indicates that those sites ready to expand, should go ahead, but points out that there are many provinces facing huge barriers.

The multiple stories that have been generated by the impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa and South Africa are told in words and pictures in a major new exhibition which opened in Cape Town recently. Over the past nine years, Gideon Mendell, a South African photo journalist based in the UK, has focused his work on capturing the lives and experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS around the world. The result is “A Broken Landscape” which is on display at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. Part of the exhibition focuses on people who are receiving anti-retroviral therapy in Cape Town in a project run by Medecins Sans Frontieres and the Western Cape health department. This audio report is in Sesotho.