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“In terms of the individual patient, your best chance is your first chance. The time you lose you on your first regimen, it’s an important milestone. When I treat a child I don’t want to prolong life by 5 or 10 years. I want to get that child to 60 years of age, I want him to finish school, go to university, be a parent. So the only way you can do it is by sequencing your regimens and treatments the right way. So you’re hoping that 20 or 25 years from now there will be other strategies to take that person further on in life. So it’s a huge challenge, and maybe a bit of a dream target. But it may become true, I believe it will.”

- Dr. Avy Violari,
Deputy Executive Director

Avy Violari, MD, FCPaed (SA)
Deputy Executive Director

When Avy Violari first came to South Africa in 1996, she didn’t intend to stay. A recent university graduate, the Grecian-born Violari left the University of Bonn in Germany to spend a year in South Africa before returning to Europe to begin her career. Four years later she had completed her paediatrics training at the University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg. A few short months after initially agreeing to volunteer once a week at PHRU’s pediatric HIV/AIDS clinic, she joined the organization full-time. “Once a week became almost every day and then I just gave up my other job completely. It was very rewarding giving people treatment and seeing the improvement and preventing infections to babies. I was drawn to it and I couldn’t think of any other career, I just wanted to do this.”

From there she began working tirelessly to expand the then novel approach of using nevaripine to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) throughout Soweto. “We had very little money and the politics at the time were against us. We had to reach out to 13 sites and 30,000 people and we had doubts whether we’d be able to do it—it was against all odds. We went from clinic to clinic, meeting with the nurses and midwives, trying to convince them that this is the right thing to do.” But by the end of the six weeks, Violari and her team had expanded the PMTCT program to all 13 sites in Soweto.

Today, more than a decade later, Dr. Violari is head of PHRU’s paediatric division, leading one of the largest and most successful PMTCT programs in Africa and tackling the last remaning questions around paediatric HIV. Bringing extensive clinical trials experience in paediatric and PMTCT research with a special interest in early HIV infection in infants, Violari’s work has resulted in some of the most significant advances in the prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV worldwide.

But she is quick to share the credit. “You know when you do research, everyone contributes. It’s a like a puzzle. Everyone contributes to answer one part of the question and hopefully, in the end, all parts will be put together to have an answer on how to deal with this disease.”


Education
MD, University of Bonn, Germany
FCPaed(SA), Paediatrics and Child Health, College of Medicine, South Africa