Mom-to-be on HIV/AIDS drugs hopes for healthy baby

Thantazwa Dlamini is HIV-positive and eight months pregnant. She is South Africa's first expectant mother to be taking anti-retroviral drugs in a programme endorsed by the state.

Her treatment is an important benchmark in the country's struggle against HIV/AIDS. The drugs will not only bring back Dlamini's health, but will almost annul the chances that her baby is born HIV-positive.

Dlamini, who gets the drugs from the Gugulethu health care centre, no longer worries that she will die before her children can grow up. She no longer worries that her unborn child will die young and in pain.

And she no longer needs to take part in the province's programme to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS.

A total of 150 women with stage four HIV/AIDS are to be put on anti-retroviral drugs at the Gugulethu centre.

"I am so, so happy that my baby will be fine," Dlamini, 29, said. "The baby is the right size and the doctor says it is healthy.

"It was such a shock when I discovered I was pregnant. I still had TB symptoms and I was weak and thin. The doctor said I was in a bad condition to be pregnant. I was terribly worried and depressed."

Dlamini, who lives in a tiny shack in Philippi with her boyfriend and child, works in the flower industry.

She moaned in pain during the interview. Just days before she had been released from Groote Schuur Hospital where she was treated for shingles. Beads of sweat covered her forehead and clusters of large scabs lined her jaw.

"Oh my God," she whispered unexpectedly, at one point. Her lips quivered and one of her hands flew to hold the back of her head, the other to her face.

HIV/AIDS experts said that during the first month of anti-retroviral treatment, when the immune system begins to repair, opportunistic infections like shingles that lurk in the body can be "tickled" back into existence, but disappear as treatment progresses.

Administering the drugs does not always run smoothly.

For three days last week, Thantazwa did not take anti-retrovirals. She ran out after being admitted to hospital.

When a nursing sister went to Groote Schuur to take her more drugs, Dlamini had been discharged and could not be located. Thantazwa said she had tried to phone her counsellor several times to get more anti-retrovirals, but could not get through.

"The lapse in treatment should mean nothing at all, because she stopped taking all three drugs at the same time," said Linda-Gail Bekker, one of the doctors who set up the Gugulethu anti-retroviral programme.

"Resistance to the drugs is more likely to build up if she stopped taking one or two of the drugs, not all three. Her viral load was already down when she stopped the treatment and she is back on her drugs today."

The triple therapy will reduce the chances of Dlamini's baby getting HIV/AIDS to around two percent, Bekker said. Studies in Europe showed a transmission rate of one to two percent among pregnant women on the drugs.

Names have been changed to protect the patient's identity.