A study in Africa and India has established that HIV-infected breast feeding mothers who's babies are given the antiretroviral drug nevirapine have less of a risk of passing the virus on to their babies.
The drug is already widely used in developing countries to prevent the spread to nursing babies according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. The research t
eam and colleagues gave daily does of nevirapine to the breast-feeding babies when they were 8 to 42 days old. They found that at the 6 week stage the rate of HIV among the babies who had received the drug was half of those that received only a dose of the drug at birth, which is the current therapy. At the 6-month stage, it was found that the infants who had received the 6-week regime were one third less likely to have contracted HIV.
The study consisted of 2,000 babies and was conducted between 2001 and 2007. It is one of the first controlled trials to show that a drug can prevent the transmission of HIV from HIV positive mothers to their children during breast feeding which is one of the most prevalent ways the HIV virus is spread in the developing world.
[Source: YahooNews]
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