The Problem – Information on Mother-to-Child Transmission
“I really hope that my baby will be healthy.” Rangita from Bangalore, India, seems anxious and helpless. She is nine months pregnant and has AIDS for two years. “I got the virus from my husband. He was already infected and now I am too. Luckily, I found out about the treatment for my baby and myself in the hospital now.”
Dr. Glory Alexander, doctor and Director of the ASHA Foundation, explains: Rangita is not an isolated case. There are more than five million people living with HIV/AIDS in India. 40,000 babies are born with the virus in India every year. They are infected at the end of the pregnancy, during birth or breastfeeding. There are now more and more facilities that carry out HIV/AIDS tests and treat pregnant women ill with HIV/AIDS in India but there are still nine million pregnant women, particularly in rural areas, who have no access to these services.
The correct term for ‘mother-to-child transmission’ would actually be ‘parent-to-child transmission’ because both parents should be involved in preventive care for the baby and in the required drug treatments. To make a difference, the overall healthcare framework must be improved and the family’s environment must be taken into account.
It is possible to prevent transmission from mother to child!
It has been possible to prevent transmission of HIV from mother to child since 1998. One third of the treatments carried out still consist of administering a single dose of the drug nevirapine. However, later research and all-round practical experience have shown that particularly in poorer countries, where the rate of HIV infection is high and the health system weak, better results can be achieved through longer treatment
So a simple and very inexpensive way to clearly reduce the rate of HIV transmission from mother to child from 30 - 40% to only 16% would be simply to use more nevirapine. The risk of infection could be reduced even further to under 2% through the use of modern combination drug treatments.
In Germany pregnant women have access to a wide range of preventive measures: from voluntary HIV tests to prenatal examinations and very effective drug treatments. Transmission can also be prevented during childbirth and through the use of alternatives to breastfeeding, which means that in Germany, at fewer than 25 children per year, not even one percent of the children of HIV-positive mothers are infected.
Progress is being made, but for hundreds of thousands of babies it is too late and too slow
In poorer countries, too, there has been a noticeable increase in funding. The Millennium Goals set in the year 2000 and the commitments made at the UN Special Session on HIV/AIDS in 2001 have brought progress. However, the goal of providing everyone worldwide with access to medical treatment, care and preventive measures by 2010 cannot be achieved. It is too late for that now.
In 2008 drug treatment was made available to 45 percent of the pregnant women who were HIV-positive. In 2007 it had only been 35 percent. However, it is by no means access for all in 2010 yet! In spite of the progress made, according to the figures from the World Health Organization for 2008, far more than 400,000 children every year are being infected with HIV. Over 90% of these children die due to HIV transmission from their mothers – more than half of them in their first two years of life.
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