PESHAWAR, Oct 23: The National Aids Control Programme (NACP) has issued new guidelines for prevention of parent to child transmission of HIV in the country, under which the HIV-positive women can breastfeed their children, but they should start taking antiretroviral (ARV) treatment to safeguard the baby against transmission of the disease, officials said.

They said that the guidelines issued in 2006 were not clear about the breastfeeding due to which majority of women fed their children on formula milk that often caused diarrhoea, pneumonia and deaths among infants.

The guidelines, prepared by the NACP have been endorsed by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Pakistan (SOGP), state that the HIV-infected mothers should take ARV for a year to prevent the disease transmission to their babies through breastfeeding.

“There is only one per cent chance that the newborn babies could get HIV infection from their positive mothers,” said officials, quoting research studies.

According to the WHO, Pakistan has an estimated 27,000 HIV-positive women and 6,000 of them happened to become pregnant every year. The new guidelines would be put into practice in all the hospitals of the country and the SOGP's members would refer the HIV-positive women to the respective centres, the officials said.

“In Pakistan, the HIV was prevalent among 0.1 per cent population, but studies have revealed that the infection rate is 21 per cent among intravenous drugs users (IDUs),” Oussama Tawil, country coordinator of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/Aids for Pakistan and Afghanistan, told Dawn .

He said that majority of the IDUs were married and 10 per cent of them had HIV-positive wives. The wives of the rest of the IDUs are also at the risk of getting the deadly infection.

The official said that 6.4 per cent of the transgender population carried the infection and there was possibility that they could spread the ailment.

The new guidelines, he said, were part of the efforts by the government and the UN to ensure elimination of paediatric HIV infections.