99 percent of children born to HIV positive mothers uninfected
6 May 2008
The largest study into mother-to-child HIV transmission to date has found that only 1.2 percent of infants born to a mother who has HIV are infected if the mother has followed recommended interventions. The study results are published online in the journal AIDS.
This is a drop from over 20 percent in the mid 1990s, before effective antiretroviral therapy (ART) became available, and is the first time that such low rates of infection have been observed. Researchers collected data from 5151 HIV positive pregnant women in the UK and Ireland between 2000 and 2006.
Claire Townsend, Research Fellow at the University College London (UCL) Institute of Child Health and lead author on the study said:
“Our findings are greatly encouraging. They demonstrate that if women are tested for HIV early enough in pregnancy for ART to be initiated, the risk of infection to their baby is very low indeed. This emphasizes the importance of achieving and maintaining a high uptake of antenatal HIV testing on a national scale.’’
Antenatal testing is recommended to all pregnant women in the UK and Ireland and acceptance rates are high.
Most HIV positive women now take a combination of ART drugs during pregnancy, and while caesarean section delivery reduces the risk of infection to the child, this study showed that in many cases the drugs are so effective that a normal delivery is possible.
The research was carried out at UCL Institute of Child Health, in collaboration with the British Paediatric Surveillance Unit and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. The study was funded by the Health Protection Agency and the Medical Research Council.
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