Striking a Better Bargain with HIV
New interventions needed to save infants and to spare mothers
By Ben Harder
During roughly every minute you spend reading this article, a mother somewhere in the world will pass on to her infant HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Damming this current of HIV transmission would be rather simple from a medical standpoint. But it requires either a daunting financial cost or a Faustian biological bargain in which a mother acting in her infant’s best interests may reduce her own later chances of avoiding full-blown AIDS. Researchers are searching for a better deal, but with every passing minute, another newborn gets the virus.
In prosperous countries, a woman with HIV can begin a lifelong course of drugs that not only increases her life span but also cuts her chance of passing the virus on to her baby during pregnancy, birth, and breast-feeding from 25 to 40 percent to less than 2 percent. But in much of the world, the cost of continuous treatment is prohibitive, and physicians must make calculated trade-offs to get the most out of a limited drug supply.