"From Mothers To Mothers To Be". This is the name of a programme operating out of the maternity section of Groote Schuur Hospital every Thursday. Each week, a group of pregnant women with HIV meet for education and counselling to help them deal positively with their status. Facilitating the programme are other women: happy mothers who want to share their skills and experiences of what they learned through the programme while they themselves were pregnant and newly diagnosed with HIV. The end goal of "From Mothers To Mothers To Be" is to prepare women for an opportunity to be put on a drug programme to prevent them from transmitting HIV to their babies. Khopotso Bodibe of Health-e News Service went along to find out more about this special service.

"Without the intervention of anti-retroviral drugs, a caesarean section or the substitution of breast milk by other supplements, the risk of a pregnant woman with HIV passing on the virus onto her baby is not 100 percent." This is according to Steve Andrews, a doctor who works exclusively with people infected with AIDS, at the Brooklyn Medical Centre in Cape Town. Dr Andrews says a positive pregnant woman has a one in three chance of transmitting HIV to her baby. In this audio report we meet Ms X, a mother of two who stays in KTC township in the Western Cape. She is HIV positive and has two children who were born five years apart. Her eldest child is nine years old and has HIV, the second is five years old and is negative. As she told Khopotso Bodibe, Ms X says had she known that she was HIV positive, she wouldn't have chosen to have children.

In this final audio report on the divergent experiences of two women taking anti-retroviral therapy under trials run by Somerset Hospital, in Cape Town, we hear about the social issues related to the provision of therapy.

In an earlier report, patients on antiretroviral therapy explained how crucially important counselling is when taking such medication. In the third part of this series focusing on the complexities of this treatment for HIV/AIDS, we look at the issue of side-effects experienced by some patients taking the drugs. Like all medidcation, anti-retroviral therapy has certain side effects. Elaine Maane, who withdrew from therapy trials run by the Somerset Hospital HIV/AIDS research unit, told Khopotso Bodibe of her adverse reaction to the drugs.

As government and the Treatment Action Campaign meet in the Constitutional Court, HIV positive mothers and AIDS experts celebrate the effect of Nevirapine in preventing mother-to-child HIV transmission.

Ground-breaking research aimed at using short courses of anti-retroviral drugs to boost the long-term immunity of babies with HIV is due to begin within weeks at St Mary's Hospital in Marianhill, outside Durban.

Taking anti-retrovirals as part of a drug trial requires much more than the desire to recover one's health. It requires commitment to a drug regimen that involves rigorous adherence to swallowing a number of pills. Without the necessary counselling - and psychological and emotional support - it is very difficult to stay on the programme successfully and complete the treatment. In this audio report two women who have been on ARV therapy in a drug trial programme run by Somerset Hospital in Cape Town tell of their experiences. One of them, Elaine Maane, opted to pull out from the research.

South Africa's battle against HIV/AIDS has been given a massive $165-million (about R1,8-billion) boost from the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria - almost double the national HIV/AIDS budget of R1-billion for this year.

The cost of antiretroviral drugs means that many poor people are unable to access such treatment. One way in which some doctors assist their patients is to offer them access to antiretroviral drug trials. At Somerset Hospital in Cape Town some people in Stage 3 of AIDS are offered a combination of registered medicines as well as drugs that are still going through the final stages of development before registration. In this audio report, Khopotso Bodibe talks to two women - one is still participating in the trials and another who has withdrawn due to problems that arose during treatment.