You're listening to the BBC World Service. I'm Audrey Brown. This is the story of AIDS.

Since the first cases of AIDS were identified 40 years ago, 35 million people have died

from the disease. The world's worst affected country is my own, South Africa. It had a

tragically slow response to the epidemic, obstructed by political turmoil, prejudice, and

an skeptical president who questioned the established signs of AIDS. When life-saving

drugs were available, Tabo Mbeke refused to roll them out, and at a time when South

Africa was suffering a thousand deaths a day, doctors and nurses working on the front line

were woefully underprepared.

I remember when I first hear about HIV, we didn't know anything about that. In our training

years, there was absolutely nothing like HIV. We didn't come across any disease like

HIV.

This is System Boomi Manthangana, a nurse from the Western Cape on the southern tip of

the continent.

In the late 1990s, that's when we started to hear about HIV. And we never thought that

it would come to us in our townships, you know, because we believe that it was a white

person sickness, and more especially the gay family disease, you know. We never thought

that it would really struck the way it struck in our doorsteps.

Everybody was scared, you know, we didn't have information. I remember I was working in

a small clinic, family planning clinic. We were flooded by people that were coming into

the clinic and they wanted to test for HIV. And there was absolutely nothing. There were

no pamphlets, there was nothing that talks about HIV. You didn't know what to say to a patient

that is coming and you test this patient and the patient test positive. You didn't know

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