'Why me?' wonders teenage girl

When Sarah's mother told her that she had been accidentally infected with HIV while she was a young TB patient, all the teenager kept asking was "Why me?"

Now, as the oldest of 42 HIV-positive South African babies and children whose parents are HIV-negative, the 16-year-old wants her mother to take Western Cape health authorities to court over her infection believed to be accidental "so that this can't happen to anyone else".

Sarah and the vast majority of the babies and children believed to have been accidentally infected with HIV in South African hospitals cannot even access a disability grant from the government.

The blame has fallen on infected breast milk, dirty syringes and what the Treatment Action Campaign has described as"largely inadequate infection controls". It's a situation Sarah says has left her feeling "hurt".

But the northern suburbs high school pupil who now counsels HIV-positive children said: "I like to think there is a reason from God for this.

"When I was younger, I couldn't understand why my sisters were all well but I was sick. I was very, very angry especially because no one could say exactly how I'd been infected. Now I'm trying to make sense of things."

Sarah was one of 14 HIV positive babies and children with HIV-negative parents documented in a 2004 medical study entitled "Unexplained HIV 1 Infection in Children: Documenting Cases and Assessing for Possible Risk Factors".

This study found that two of the children studied in the research had "severe end organ disease", one had chronic lung disease and another was a "spastic quadriplegic".
After being treated at the Tygerberg Children's hospital for TB when she was nine years old, Sarah went from one health crisis to another.

But it was only after a nurse had a needle-stick injury while treating Sarah and sought her mother's permission to test the little girl for HIV, that her positive status was discovered.

It would be another three years before Sarah's mother encouraged by Professor Mark Cotton, researcher into nosocomial, or hospital based, HIV infections built up the courage to tell her daughter that she was HIV-positive.

"That was the hardest thing of all," Sarah's mother said.

"She kept saying, 'But how come, mommy? Why me?' and I could only tell her 'No one knows'."

Sarah, whose use of anti retrovirals and healthy diet have kept her CD4 count at over 1000 for several months, is afraid of revealing her HIV positive status to her friends.

"People are so ignorant and I am scared of what they will think, so I am careful about who I tell and what I tell them."

Her mother, who survives on a disability grant, is also afraid of what will happen if Sarah's health deteriorates.

"I had an attorney because I thought maybe we had a case against the government, but he took a lot of money from us and then said there was nothing he could do to help us.

"I just pray my daughter stays strong. She has already suffered so much."