"The clinic has been providing mother-to-baby prevention for over two years and sees about 1,500 deliveries a year. HIV awareness has skyrocketed. People are talking about it

and asking where are the antretrovirals. They are becoming activists and are looking for treatments."
Professor Wood adds: "They were looking out for their children and now they're saying 'What about me?'. The uptake of testing for the pregnant mothers is now over 90 per cent and they vote with their feet in a big way."
"The Western Cape is very advanced compared with the rest of South Africa," Professor Bekker continues. "The regional health ministry has turned a blind eye to what we're doing despite the fact that the national government has been opposed to the use of anti-HIV drugs.
"The Crusaid Treatment Centre will pull patients who now need therapy from nine separate clinics in the township. Up till now all we could offer were treatments for opportunistic infections in adults with HIV. We now hope to put these adults on triple therapy, targeting the sickest first.

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"Our patients are as compliant with the drug regimes as any in the world. When our women were offered the mother-to-child prevention programme, we were told they wouldn't want it, but 95 per cent of them take it up."
"Out of this we hope to get a clinic that we can evaluate properly and then be able to take this model, roll it out to other areas in the state and hope we can then cover 1.7 million of our population.
"We've also tried some innovations with adherence support, like

Gugulethu - a portakabin clinic

using counsellors who are HIV themselves to act as adherence monitors. This is called our 'Sizopila' project - meaning 'I will survive'. Each counsellor will look after about 15 people in the community, keep tabs on them, help them take their drugs properly and monitor problems. They will keep in touch with the clinic via mobile phones donated by a local company.

We think there'll be such a demand when the drugs are used. Then we can go to the pharmacos and say: 'You said we haven't got the infrastructure, well now we have and it's