‘My child can now grow and grow and grow, thank God’

That was nearly two years ago. Today, at the same hospital, another nurse showed Butshingi, 24, a piece of paper revealing the news she had hoped for: Her plump and outwardly healthy one-year-old son Luthando showed no signs of the virus in his blood. Butshingi covered her face, then smiled down at her sleeping baby. Like thousands of other babies born at the hospital in the past few years, he had escaped HIV.

‘‘It’s unbelievable. I am positive, but the baby comes out negative!’’ Butshingi said, crying. ‘‘He can grow and grow and grow and grow, thank God.’’

Researchers say there are no reliable statistics on how many babies nevirapine has saved nationwide. But at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital—the main source of prenatal and obstetric care for millions of people in Soweto, the sprawling township near Johannesburg—25 per cent of babies born to HIV-positive women contracted the disease in the 1990s, before nevirapine became available. Now that the drug is administered routinely, the infection rate is about 8 per cent.

‘‘It’s your magic bullet,’’ said Glenda Gray, director of the Perinatal HIV Research Unit at the hospital. ‘‘A pill to the mother, a pill to the baby, and you halve transmission rates.’’

The government runs a $4 million programme to prevent mother-to-child transmission in Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg, Soweto and Pretoria, and four out of five pregnant women with HIV receive nevirapine. The test is considered reliable after a child’s first birthday.

Some of these numbers were reported Tuesday in the Star, a Johannesburg daily. Nomonde Xundu, the province’s director of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases, warned against extrapolating limited data to calculate how many babies had been saved from infection but agreed the news was good. ‘‘The 8 per cent is encouraging,’’ she said, ‘‘but you need to be careful how you interpret it.’’

For years, the South African government warned that nevirapine had dangerous side effects and could not be reliably administered without improving the quality of care available at state-run hospitals. The AIDS activist group Treatment Action Campaign filed a lawsuit against the government in 2001 demanding the distribution of nevirapine to HIV-positive pregnant women across the country, and won.

Since then, there has been little evidence of dangerous side effects from nevirapine, though there is evidence that use can create resistance to it and similar anti-HIV medicines. Researchers fear that women who use nevirapine during the births of their children will be resistant to other anti-retroviral drugs later, when they develop AIDS.

South Africa has the highest instance of HIV infection in the world. Doctors at Chris Hani Baragwanath said more than 25 per cent of pregnant women in Soweto are infected, a rate even higher than national data on HIV prevalence among non-elderly South Africans. ‘‘Saving thousands of babies in any other city would be profound,’’ Gray said, but in Soweto, ‘‘it’s only a foot in the door.’’

— (LAT-WP)