Sundays in hostels around Gauteng are inevitably filled with music and dance as migrant workers relax over the weekend. For staff of the African Culture, Music and Dance Association (Acumda), Sunday is a working day on which they will visit a designated hostel to hold music and dance competitions for the best performance that speaks about HIV and AIDS. In this three-part series, Sue Valentine spent a day with the Acumda programme at the Khutsong Hostel in Carltonville listening to a variety of messages about HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention as well as care and support. This is part 1.

Two leading business figures, Clem Sunter of Anglo American and Peter Doyle of Metropolitan Life, are alarmed at the slow and ill-informed attitude by the business sector towards the presence of HIV/AIDS in our society.

While the heat of public attention has been focused on government and its response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the business sector has been slow to come to terms with the potential impact of the disease on people and how to pre-empt it.

The much-spoken of TRIPS Agreement - or Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights - is often cited as key factor which cannot be violated in the quest for access to cheaper medicines. But what does TRIPS actually say? Law analyst Jonathan Berger offers a brief history of TRIPS and how pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and computer king IBM pushed for World Trade Organisation approval for such an agreement. He argues that TRIPS balances protection of intellectual property rights with the right of people to access essential medicines.

The impact of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe has forced communities to take a sober look at certain cultural practices that were previously accepted without question. Zimbabwe, which shares an AIDS profile similar to South Africa's with around one in four adults HIV positive, has had to revise its life expectancy downwards from 65 to 43 years because of the disease. Sue Valentine spoke to Zimbabwean AIDS worker Caroline Maposhere about how certain cultural practices are changing because of the epidemic.

Seabelo Kgarose is a young mother living with HIV/AIDS. For a while her youngest son, who is also HIV positive, was in a care centre at a local hospital. On one occasion when she and her other two children went to visit him, she was verbally abused by one of the nurses. However, months later, this same nurse turned up at the AIDS counselling centre where Seabelo works seeking counselling and support to come to terms with her HIV positive status. In this audio report, Seabelo tells the story.

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.

The AIDS organisation, Wola Nani has contracted a group of actors to run workshops to empower people with HIV in their daily relationships and interactions. However, this is not just another role play by actors in front of an audience. Using the Boal Forum Theatre technique, the actors encourage the audience to take part in the play and to change the way in which the drama is played out. The idea is to build people's confidence and to take charge of the situations in which they find themselves. Sue Valentine spent a day with the Cape Heart Theatre company.

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.

More than 300 people attended the Treatment Action Campaign's Western Cape provincial conference this weekend. The organisation declared its intention to begin a campaign in April to ensure that clinics offered basic medicines and treated people with HIV/AIDS with dignity and respect.

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.