TEMBISA, South Africa -- Flora Mogano has given up waiting for someone to come and help treat the people with AIDS in her township. When the government is slow, she makes do with miracles.
But judging by her patient records -- laboriously handwritten in exercise books -- the record on miracles here is patchy. On every page, many of the names are skewered with a fluorescent green line: the ones who have died. Of 377 people in her latest book, for last year and this, 100 are dead.
Free antiretroviral medicines, released in five hospitals two weeks before South Africa's recent elections, have not yet reached this township north of Johannesburg. But Mogano, 60, swears by a different medicine, an "immune booster" with plant-based vitamins and minerals, along with plenty of humble prayer.
"The majority of people spend their money looking for a better witch doctor," said Mogano, a traditional healer. "After they've tried their best and failed, they come to me."
Just after it took power a decade ago, the African National Congress government promised a comprehensive AIDS treatment policy. It has taken 10 years to arrive.
In the meantime, AIDS has become the country's No. 1 killer, and South Africa has more HIV-positive citizens than any other country. By some estimates, more than half a million South Africans have died of AIDS-related illnesses. The disease claims some 600 lives daily, a figure that is likely to skyrocket, AIDS experts say.
A survey released this month said nearly 7% of South African children between the ages of 2 and 9 are infected with HIV.
Former President Nelson Mandela has acknowledged that he did not do enough to combat the epidemic, and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, has questioned whether the human immunodeficiency virus causes AIDS and whether the antiretroviral drugs widely used in the developed world help or hurt.
That has left many of the 5.3 million HIV-positive South Africans dependent on volunteers such as Mogano and other traditional healers, many pushing questionable remedies.
Asked whether she believed that antiretroviral drugs, rather than her "immune booster" capsules, could be a solution, Mogano pursed her lips and replied primly, "The solution is prayer."
Mogano claims to have cured many patients with prayer and sees the disease as a punishment for sin.
