The five-month-old Johannesburg baby who was raped at the weekend faces at least a year of operations before she will be able to lead a normal life.
Dr Graeme Pitcher, the paediatric surgeon from Johannesburg Hospital who performed emergency surgery on her at midnight on Saturday, said her pelvic floor had been so badly ripped that it constituted a life-threatening injury.
The vagina of a five-month-old baby is so small that an adult's little (pinkie) finger is all that can fit inside. Raping a baby can result in the vagina being torn through to the rectum.
Pitcher said initial surgery was performed to clean the wounds and remove faecal matter from the bowel to prevent infection. A hole was made in the abdomen and a colostomy bag inserted to collect faeces.
The baby is to be left to heal for about six months. Only once her wounds have healed is reconstructive surgery to be attempted, in one or more procedures. Once her body has healed from the surgery, the colostomy bag will be removed.
Pitcher said there were no long-term studies to show whether infants who have been injured in this way ever regain control over their bodily functions.
The five-month-old could probably have a child of her own once she was grown up, but it would have to be born by caesarean section.
Pitcher also fought for the baby to be given anti-retroviral treatment to prevent HIV infection - and managed to obtain a donation of AZT and 3TC in syrup from Sunninghill Hospital.
He was one of a number of people who said they believed the spate of baby rapes could be linked to the perception that HIV can be cured by having sex with a virgin.
Nelson Mandela on Monday called for a national campaign to fight this perception.
PAC health secretary Dr Costa Gazi also blamed this myth for the spate of baby rapes.
"I blame Thabo Mbeki more than anyone else. Because there is this belief that sleeping with a virgin would cure you of Aids," Gazi said.
Pitcher said the myth was "the only possible explanation for the phenomenon" of baby rape. He said he had been working at Johannesburg Hospital for the past decade, but had only seen infant rape victims over the past two to three years.
"It ties in with the president's (Mbeki's) total oblivion to the true nature of the HIV epidemic," Pitcher said.
Dr Sebastian van As, head of the trauma unit at the Red Cross Children's Hospital in Cape Town, said the hospital saw about 100 cases of child rape a year. A tenth of these seroconvert to HIV.
A survey conducted by the hospital revealed that, over the past nine years, 10 rape victims admitted were less than 12 months old.
"If the world could see what these children's perineums (the area between the vagina and the anus) look like, they would be as angry as I am," Pitcher said.