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Africans are disproportionally affected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and black women in particular are at high risk of being infected with HIV. 1 Over the past two and a half decades, from 1990 to 2015, South Africa’s HIV and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic grew from under one per cent to slightly more than 12 per cent of the population, or an estimated 6.8 million people. 2 In South Africa, AIDS was initially associated with gay men, persons receiving unsafe blood transfusions, and haemopheliacs, with the first cases of the epidemic identified in the 1980s among men who have sex with men. 3 During the early 1990s, the HIV epidemic spread quickly throughout the general population through heterosexual interactions as well as mother-to-child transmission, with pregnant women and children bearing the brunt of the disease. The epidemic grew rapidly in the black African population, particularly among those who lived in informal settlements, where poverty is rife. 4 The HIV epidemic became generalised and grew exponentially from around 1990. In 2012, new infections were still rising at the rate of 369 000 per year5 and HIV/AIDS-related mortality was estimated at 43.3 per cent of all deaths in 2011.6 A re-analysis of South African mortality data reported to the United Nations revealed that 94 per cent of all the HIV/AIDS-related deaths between 1996 and 2006 were misclassified and not counted as HIV/AIDS-related deaths. Conditions such as tuberculosis, other respiratory infections, intestinal infectious diseases, parasitic diseases, meningitis, other infectious conditions, digestive disorders and ill-defined …