Lucky is not a word usually applied to people living in wind-swept Khayelitsha. Yet this is how Pumeza Bikwe and over a thousand other mothers feel, thanks to a unique health programme that may have saved their babies'€™ lives.

Three-year-old Alexander Heyns plays next to his mother at the physiotherapy centre, fitting shapes together into a box. "Look, mama, they are all in now," he says, blue eyes sparkling. "When he first came here, he would never do this," says his mother, Lynette. "He would come in shouting and charge around, touching everything. He found it difficult to focus."

When Agnes Nyamayarwo'€™s son, Peter, was four years old, he discovered from a boy at his school that his mother was HIV positive."This boy warned the other children not to share Peter'€™s food because they would get AIDS from him," says Nyamayarwo."I felt very bad that he heard it from school. We think we are protecting them [by not telling them about our HIV status] but somehow they get to know

While central government is pursuing further pilot studies on the use of the drug nevirapine to prevent mother-to-child (MTC) HIV transmission, the Western Cape is rolling out an MTC prevention programme using the drug, AZT.

The punitive measures that Swaziland and Botswana want to introduce for HIV positive people are unfortunate, says AIDS expert.

Older people, particularly women, bear the brunt of caring for AIDS orphans. However, many of these people are not yet 60 years old and have no access to pensions. For this reason, some organisations are calling on government to lower the pension age to ease the burden of care on "underage" grandmothers and grandfathers.

It came unexpectedly: the question that most parents try to rehearse the answer to, but inevitably mess up when reality strikes. My six-year-old turned to me out of the blue and said: "But what I don'€™t understand is how the seed from the man gets into the woman'€™s egg."My initial response was to gloss over her question. After all, at six a child shouldn'€™t know about sex, I reasoned. But she persisted, so I had little option but to dive into a quick-'€˜n-basic lesson on anatomy '€“ which both amused and fascinated her.

"I refuse to be identical to a statistic. I feel, I get sexy, I get hungry. Whatever you feel about your sexuality, I also feel," declared Brigitte Syamalevure, mother of 11 and an HIV positive Zambian.

The failure of a special vaginal gel to prevent sex workers from getting HIV means that condoms remain the world's only protection against the disease during sex .

Government was yesterday presented with evidence that it could save the lives of thousands of babies cheaply and effectively by giving their HIV positive mothers the drug Nevirapine during labour. The drug could cut the rate of HIV transmission from mother to child by about one third, meaning that only about 7% of babies born to HIV positive women would be infected at birth.

Have you ever spoken to your children about sex?How should parents broach the subject of sex with their children? These and other questions were posed to a selected group of famous parents in South Africa. KERRY CULLINAN reports.