Star Chimaliro is a woman living with HIV in the Mzimba district of Malawi. She has a one year old baby daughter Mutisunge Jere (‘Mutisunge’ in Chitumbuka means ‘keeping together’). Star’s first born child is 3 years old.When Star was pregnant with Mutisunge, her husband began falling ill often. She became suspicious and decided to go for voluntary HIV testing and discovered that she was positive. Her husband also agreed to voluntary testing after this and discovered that he too was HIV positive.
Star is a member of the Khaputa support group, an organisation involved in home-based care for people living with HIV (PLHIV) in the community. Members of the support group come from nearby villages and comprise different denominations and religions. All of them, like Star, are living with HIV.
The Khaputa support group receives a lot of encouragement and support from the local church’s women’s guild. The women’s guild and support group members have cleared land around the church and planted an extensive garden to supplement the income and nutritional levels of PLHIV in the surrounding area. The Khaputa support group has received home-based kits and a bicycle ambulance from MANET+ and One World Action’s ‘Our Voices, Our Lives Programme’.
Like many women living with HIV, Star finds the support group particularly valuable. “We get very little support from anyone else, even from our husbands.”
Malawi's current policy is to routinely test pregnant women who attend antenatal clinics, unless they specifically decline testing. However, of the 500,000 pregnant women who attended antenatal clinics in the country up to October 2007, only 162,000 were tested.
The risk of an HIV-positive pregnant woman passing on the virus to her baby is between 30 and 35 percent. The Malawi government is proposing to pass a controversial law that makes HIV testing mandatory for pregnant women, an attempt by government to reduce mother-to-child transmission, without actually addressing the root of the problem – that it is often the husband who initially infects the wife.
This proposed law will violate women’s privacy and contribute to increased discrimination against women living with HIV. Mandatory testing will make it possible to single out HIV- positive women but will not ensure that they get the necessary treatment to prevent transmission of the virus to their babies. Only half of the 19,120 pregnant women who tested positive for HIV in Malawi in 2006 received preventative treatment. 1
Only 28 percent of the 544 clinics providing maternal services in Malawi offer prevention of mother-to-child transmission services. Star Chimaliro was one of the Malawian mothers who did not receive the service and consequently passed on the infection to her daughter, Mutisunge.
Unlike many young mothers in Malawi she is fortunate to have the support of her family and is not blamed for the infection. Star has not bothered to test her eldest child as she is convinced that the first born is healthy.
Star’s husband went on antiretroviral therapy but it was too late and he is now dying of AIDS. She is caring for him with the support of her family. Star herself is on antiretroviral therapy. Mutisunge goes for regular checkups although antiretroviral therapy for babies is not available at her local hospital. Both Star and her baby are stable for the time being but are facing a very unstable future.
1 http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=75984
By Tara Brace-John, Governance Policy Programme Co-ordinator
