WHO Updates Recommendations To Reduce Mother-To-Child HIV Infection

Main Category: HIV / AIDS
Also Included In: Pregnancy / Obstetrics;  Pediatrics / Children's Health;  Women's Health / Gynecology
Article Date: 23 Jul 2010 - 5:00 PDT

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The World Health Organization issued updated guidelines for improving efforts to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV by testing women earlier in their pregnancies and testing and treating infants sooner after their births, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Eliminating mother-to-child HIV infections by 2015 is a major goal for WHO, UNAIDS and other public health organizations. Each year, roughly 400,000 infants in developing countries are born with HIV or contract the virus during birth or while breastfeeding (Winslow, Wall Street Journal, 9/21).

"[N]early all" of those transmissions could be eliminated if women and infants received antiretroviral medications, according to the guidelines, which were released Tuesday at the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna (Sternberg, USA Today, 7/20). Less than half of pregnant women living with HIV currently receive medications, according to the Journal. Without treatment, the chance of mother-to-child transmission ranges from 15% to 45%. Research shows that the risk drops to nearly zero with use of antiretrovirals during pregnancy.

The new guidelines recommend that HIV-positive women breastfeed if they or their infant are receiving antiretrovirals. The issue has been controversial, but the very low risk of transmission from breastfeeding is more than offset by the life-saving nutritional benefits of the practice if either the mother or infant are receiving treatment, according to Gottfried Hirnschall, director of HIV/AIDS at WHO.

WHO also said that infants whose mothers test positive should be tested between four and six weeks after birth. Until the recent development of new testing methods, it was impossible to know for up to 18 months if infants were infected because they are born with their mothers' antibodies (Wall Street Journal, 9/21).

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