Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Did You Know....HIV and the unborn baby

So for some unknown reason, avert.org does not want to work for me today. Every time I go on the website it tells me that safari cannot find the server. So today I went to about.com for a more in depth look into HIV and newborn babies. As a recap HIV can be spread to a fetus one of three ways:
Sharing a blood supply: which is when the mother's blood circulates within the fetus and the baby is infected that way.
Infection during delivery: which is why most HIV positive women have a C-section.
Breastfeeding: for this reason women are asked not to breastfeed if they have another choice.

The risk of passing HIV to an unborn child with proper prenatal care and the use of proper antiretrovirals can be reduced to as low as 2%.

1 comment:

  1. I has always amased me how an infected mother can carry a baby for nine months and the baby's blood NOT get tained with the blood. I would think the blood circulation gose throughout the whole body. Hmmm...

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