By Dr Ananya Mandal, MD
Babies in need of HIV prevention drug
Nevirapine is considered to be an effective drug that can prevent HIV infection in babies born to mothers with HIV. However a new study shows that only about half of babies born to mothers with HIV receive the drug. The study appeared in the July 21 HIV/AIDS themed issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study included mother and baby pairs from clinics in Cameroon, Ivory Coast, South Africa and Zambia and found that only around 51% received this minimal protection. The researchers also found that many HIV positive mothers who were prescribed Nevirapine before delivery did not have the drug in the samples of their umbilical cord blood.
Study author Dr. Elizabeth Stringer, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham said, “What this study shows us is that there are programmatic failures and common problems that occur along the path to mother-to-child transmission prevention.” These problems may range from low availability to failing to take medications and lack of HIV testing. She explained, “We know that true mother-to-child transmission prevention begins with HIV testing, with finding those who are infected and getting them into a program helps them adhere to the single-dose nevirapine and other care guidelines.”
Drug users in need of support to prevent HIV spread
In a proceeding at the 18th world AIDS conference in Vienna, it was revealed that less than 10 percent of injecting drug users (IDUs) receives adequate support to prevent them from spreading HIV to others. The researchers found that of the nearly 16 million IDUs around the world, nearly three million are infected with HIV. This group is often marginalized and criminalized and this prompts them to turn to prostitution to feed their drug need. There is a lot of shared needles and this allows the disease to spread unwatched.
Louisa Degenhardt of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Australia led a study where she found –