KARACHI: The 46 babies born to mothers living with HIV/Aids in Karachi and Larkana are safe from the lethal disease and living a normal child’s life, said officials at the Sindh Aids Control Programme (SACP) on Wednesday.

They said that of the 48 HIV-positive pregnant women, 46 had delivered healthy babies in Sindh over the last few years with the efforts of SACP professionals.

The SACP had registered 48 HIV-positive expecting mothers, of whom 26 were registered at the HIV/Aids treatment centre at the Civil Hospital Karachi (CHK) while the remaining 22 were registered with the Sheikh Zaid Hospital, Larkana, they said.

They said that all 26 mothers had delivered HIV-free babies at the CHK while 20 mothers had delivered HIV-free babies in the Sheikh Zaid Hospital. The remaining two mothers were expected to deliver babies soon and it was hoped that those babies would also be free from the lethal disease, they said.

“These children were born to the mothers living with HIV/Aids at our facilities in Karachi and Larkana with no traces of the disease,” said a doctor.

A senior official said the SACP management had been working on reducing mother-to-child transmission of HIV in Sindh for the last few years. A district task force had been formed in Karachi to detect hidden cases of HIV/Aids that would help them control further spread of the deadly virus, he said, adding that similar task forces would be formed in all districts.

The officials said that apart from two prevention of parent to child transmission centres being run by the programme in Karachi and Larkana, they were giving finishing touches to nine more such facilities, which would soon be functional in the tertiary hospitals of the province.

The facilities included three in Karachi’s Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, Sobhraj Maternity Home and Ibrahim Hyderi and the remaining to be established elsewhere in the province.

Experts said that if a woman or her partner was infected with HIV or Aids, there was a 30 per cent chance that their baby would be born with the virus. The virus is transmitted during pregnancy and can be fatal if it is not treated.

They said that babies could not be diagnosed for HIV during pregnancy. However, they contracted the virus immediately before or after the pregnancy when bodily fluids and blood got exchanged.

They added that treatment as being applied by the SACP treatment centres during pregnancy of HIV-infected mothers could reduce the risk of transmission to a significant extent.

The SACP had reported several cases before in which babies contracted HIV from their mothers.

“Our objective is to save each and every such child from this lethal disease, but for that we should first detect thousands of hidden cases of HIV in Sindh,” said an official.

The officials concerned, however, claimed that they were successfully detecting such cases. The Aids control programme had registered 1,157 new HIV cases in the province last year, which included 25 children, they said.

They said that so far the programme had registered 9,107 HIV/Aids cases, of which 8,872 were HIV patients while the remaining 235 were full-blown cases.

Experts estimated that about 30 per cent of hidden cases with HIV were married patients who transmitted the virus to their partners and children.

The officials said the treatment for infected mothers was introduced in Pakistan a decade earlier. The infected mothers and their children were being treated with antiretroviral therapy, which offered oral medicines that might vary according to the intensity of the virus.

The centres register the patients who get routine check-ups and treatment.

Pakistan could pose an HIV scare for having one of the largest number of young patients in the world if preventive therapies were not successfully implemented, experts warned.

Published in Dawn, May 26th, 2016