How to stop HIV transmission?

Researchers reported Tuesday at the 18th International AIDS Conference in Vienna that about 0.4 million infants get HIV/AIDS from their mothers each year even though antiviral drugs are readily available to help completely eliminate the mother-to-infant HIV transmission.

In the USA and other developed countries, use of antiviral medications has virtually eliminated the mother-to-infant HIV transmission and infected mothers can safely breastfeed their children without transmitting the infection to their newborns if they take antiviral medication, The World Health Organization was cited as saying.

The WHO said more children with HIV had received life-saving HIV treatment, but more lives could be saved if even more children started taking medication earlier. Early HIV testing can lead to early diagnosis which help doctors to decide whether an individual should take antiviral medications.

In some areas of Africa, only half of babies born to mothers with HIV were able to receive the HIV prevention drug nevirapine, according to a new study of mothers and infants treated at clinics in Cameroon, Ivory Cost, South Africa and Zambia, healthday reports.

The study also showed the antiviral medication did not show up in the umbilical cord blood samples collected from mothers who took the medication.

The study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that failure to stop  mother to infant HIV transmission in many cases was not because the patients did not get medication, but was due to patients' failure to take the medication or inadequacies in HIV testing.

Research on how to stop HIV transmission is ongoing.  Researchers reported at the conference in Vienna that a 5-year study which will be initiated this year has been planned to test about 40,000 South Africans for HIV.

What the researchers from France and South Africa will do is screen all people  in 30 regions of South Africa and let half of the HIV positive individuals take antiviral medications immediately after diagnosis and let another half do nothing about the infection.

The purpose of the 2-year study is to see if starting treatment immediately after a diagnosis can reduce or eliminate transmission of HIV. The WHO reportedly recommends that patients not receive HIV drugs which  cause serious side effects until the number of infection-fighting cells drops to a certain level.

By Jimmy Downs