A SOUTH African provincial health minister called on Tuesday for free condoms to be distributed to schoolchildren as young as 12. “To think that schoolchildren are not having sex is … like thinking we are not going to have rugby next season,” Nick Koornhof, the Western Cape health minister, told a seminar. “You must link it to the sexual activity ages of girls and boys – 14 and 12,” he said. Koornhof said school-age sex was happening whether parents and churches liked it or not, and that HIV was rife in schools. “Where HIV is in our schools you need to have the best preventive tool available, and that’s condoms – not to blow it up or make waterbombs, but to use it for what you’re probably not supposed to be doing.” South Africa had 4.7-million HIV-positive citizens – one in nine of the population – at the end of 2000, according to government figures. – AFP