Hope for HIV moms

An estimated 20% of people in the US who have HIV don’t know it. Many others find out about their HIV status while treating another condition, like pregnancy. Until now, when a pregnant woman discovered she had HIV, the best treatment to try and prevent transfer of the virus was to give the baby the anti HIV drug zidovudine (ZDV).

Now, a National Institutes of Health study has found that adding one or two drugs to the standard ZDV post natal treatment can reduce the chances by more than 50% that an infant will develop HIV even if no other prenatal treatments have been received.

The study was conducted in hospitals around the world. Around the world, only 21% of pregnant women in low to middle income countries are tested for HIV during pregnancy. In the US, 100 to 200 babies are born each year with HIV, mostly to women who didn’t know they carried the virus.

“To reduce mother-to-child HIV transmission, it’s best to begin antiretroviral treatment during pregnancy,” said Heather Watts, MD, a medical office in NICHD’s Pediatric, Adolescent and maternal AIDS Branch, and author of the study. “However, when treatment during pregnancy isn’t possible, our results show that adding one or two drugs to the current regimen provides another important means to reduce the chance for mother-to-child HIV transmission.”

Many women who do not receive prenatal treatment get their first HIV test when they go to the hospital in labor. It is then that the virus is discovered. There is still reasonable hope, according to this study, that the transmission across to the baby can be suppressed.

Source: NIH, ScienceDaily