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New treatment to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV
PRESENTER: WHO is recommending a new approach to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission. The new recommendations allow women to breastfeed more safely. Patrick Maigua finds out more from Dr. Nigel Rollins of the World Health Organization:
mother and child
Maigua: WHO is recommending a new approach to prevent mother to child HIV transmission. Briefly outline to us what this approach is.
Rollins: One of the most fundamental changes - and this is because there is new research evidence available - is that mothers who breastfeed can receive a drug intervention either to the mother herself or giving it to the child that dramatically reduces the risk of a child becoming infected through breastfeeding. This is a very, very major advance and allows children to breastfeed almost completely safely, which means that they are also protected from other causes of infant mortality such as diarrhoea or malnutrition by being able to breastfeed.
Maigua: How different is this new approach to what was there before?
Rollins: Before there were no drug interventions, no one to reduce transmission through breastfeeding. And so the previous recommendations advised that health workers would provide the options of either breastfeeding or formula feeding to the mothers. The mothers would then have to consider her own home circumstances and then to make a decision between these two feeding options. What we are now recommending is that national health authorities and maternal health services can confidently recommend one approach, for example breastfeeding and ARVs to the mother or to the infant really relieving the health worker and the mother of this very complex counselling and set of considerations and that health services can confidently promote and support this as an intervention for all mothers, particularly in resource-limited settings.
Maigua: And what are the benefits of the new treatment approach to the mother and to the child?
Rollins: The advantages are numerous. First of all, by recognizing that mothers who need lifelong treatment that they get it. This not only improves the health of the mothers and also improves her survival, but that also improves the health and survival of the infant. For those mothers who then breastfeed, the child is not only protected from HIV transmission, but is also protected from many of the other risks that cause infants to die, especially diarrhoea and malnutrition and pneumonia. In countries like North America or in Europe, these turn up very relevant in terms of children surviving. But in most places where HIV is a very major problem, these other issues - diarrhoea and so on - are equal or even greater threats to the child's survival.
Narrator: UN Radio's Patrick Maigua speaking to Nigel Rollins of the WHO Department of Child and Adolescent Health and Development.
duration: 2'33"
