PESHAWAR, Sept 16: Effective measures must be taken to prevent HIV positive women transfer infections to their newborn babies, said Dr Nasreen Akbar, deputy programme manager of the NWFP HIV/AIDS project. “By the end of the last year about 2.2 million children under the age of 15-year were living with the HIV. Many of them were born to HIV positive mothers and acquiring the virus at the time of birth or breastfeeding,” she said, adding that last estimates showed some 8.2 million people were living with HIV/AIDS in the year 2004 in Asia and among them 2.3 million were adult women.

“In the absence of any interventions, about a third of children born to HIV positive mothers will be born with the HIV or infected through breastfeeding and this can be cut by almost three quarters if women receive both antiretroviral (ATV) and safe breast milk substitute,” Ms Akbar said.

Children born with HIV, she said, had very high mortality rate and they were over four times more likely to die by the age of two than children born without the HIV.

Dr Akbar said that around 47 per cent of the new infections each day were in women of childbearing age. Women, she said, were biologically more vulnerable to HIV infection and other Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) and this was exacerbated by socio-cultural and economic circumstances that made it difficult for women to have control over their own sexuality.

“The same social, economic and cultural factors which make women vulnerable to infection with the HIV also limit their access to HIV treatment, care and support and worsen the impact of sexual and reproductive health and make them more vulnerable to stigma and discrimination,” she said, adding that there was need for programmes to adapt sexual health reproductive health services to address the treatment, care, prevention and support needs of women with the HIV and integrating the activities in the health system.

“Antiretroviral drugs should be used within a framework of prevention, treatment and care both to prevent transmission to child and to maintain the health of the mother an all other HIV positive family members,” Dr Akbar said.

Dr Rajwal Khan, provincial programme officer of the WHO HIV/AIDS project, said that the risk of transmitting the HIV to newborn babies was very low if antiviral medication was provided.

He said that the risk of transmission increased with longer delivery times.

“If the mother uses medications and has a viral load under 1,000, the risk is almost zero. Mother with a high viral load might reduce their risk if they deliver their baby by caesarean section,” he said.

He said that around 14 per cent of the babies would get the HIV infection from infected mother’s milk. The risk, he said, could be eliminated if the HIV-infected women did not feed their babies.—PPI