How children become infected with HIV

How children become infected with HIV

Mother-to-child transmission

Nine out of ten children infected with HIV were infected through their mother either during pregnancy, labour and delivery or breastfeeding.⁸ Without treatment, around 15-30% of babies born to HIV positive women will become infected with HIV during pregnancy and delivery and a further 5-20% will become infected through breastfeeding.⁹ In high-income countries, preventive measures ensure that the transmission of HIV from mother-to-child is relatively rare, and in those cases where it does occur a range of treatment options mean that the child can survive - often into adulthood. This shows that with funding, trained staff and resources, the infections and deaths of many thousands of children could be avoided.

Blood transfusions

HIV infection can occur in medical settings; for instance, through needles that have not been sterilised or through blood transfusions where infected blood is used. In wealthier countries this problem has virtually been eliminated, but in resource-poor communities it is still an issue. The most large scale case of infections among children resulting from contaminated injections and unscreened blood transfusion occurred in Romania between 1987 to 1991 when more than 10,000 babies and children were infected with HIV as a result of unsafe medical practices.¹⁰

Unsafe blood transfusions have also led to hundreds of HIV infections in countries in the Central Asia region, namely Kazakhstan,¹¹ Kyrgyzstan¹² and Uzbekistan¹³ from 2006-2008. The widespread reuse of injection equipment as well as encouragement by doctors motivated by financial reasons to carry out 'unnecessary blood transfusions', led to the infection of at least 119 children in Kazakhstan and at least 150 in Uzbekistan from 2007-2008.

Although official statistics claim that unsafe injections account for a small percentage (2.5%) of HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa, ¹⁴ this is contested by a number of researchers. HIV prevalence in children can be 1 to 3 times higher than that of pregnant women in antenatal clinics¹⁵ and in one study as many as a fifth of children who were not sexually active had HIV negative mothers¹⁶: suggesting that the children were infected through contaminated medical procedures.