Washington Post Foreign Service. His father, a retired security guard who had badgered Mlangeni about losing too much weight, declared, "You are going to die. Soon he was given his own set of dishes, a crude but common reaction from families under the false impression that HIV can spread through casual contact. His bright, ready smile tightened into a grimace as he recalled his feelings of rejection. I had my own special blanket, everything. Last week, in announcing that his eldest son had died of complications of AIDS, Nelson Mandela urged South Africans to stop treating the disease as a sickness for which "people will go to hell and not to heaven.
The message, like appeals made by other regional leaders in the past few years, was greeted with relief by people suffering from the affliction. Yet many interviewed in recent days said they were still treated as contaminated sinners by neighbors, friends and their own families. Some are ordered to use separate toilets or to wash outside.
Others are banished. A study of HIV patients at two Johannesburg hospitals found that 38 percent had not told a single family member that they had HIV, and 21 percent had not told their sexual partners. One in 10 said diagnosis of the disease was followed by suicidal thoughts. A small number of women reported that their partners beat them after learning of the presence of the infection. Such violent reactions remain rare, although an AIDS activist was killed outside Cape Town in after she told a group of men who had gang-raped her that she had HIV.
Simple shunning is far more common and deeply hurtful, say those with the virus The reaction compounds feelings of terror and self-loathing that can accompany the diagnosis of a disease that many here believe, incorrectly, to be fatal in all cases and contracted exclusively through promiscuous sex. Although heterosexual contact is the primary means of transmission throughout Africa, researchers say that HIV infection has now reached far beyond those who have multiple sex partners.
In South Africa, according to U. Among the most vulnerable, researchers said, are women with only one sexual partner — their husbands — who either have the virus when they marry or acquire it later through an extramarital affair.
