Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT)
Each year, nearly half a million new children under the age of 15 become infected with HIV. Almost all of these infections occur in developing countries, and more than 90 percent are a result of mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) during pregnancy, labor, delivery, or breastfeeding. Without intervention, there is up to a 45 percent chance that an infant born to an HIV-infected mother will become infected.
The only way to effectively prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child is to ensure that national healthcare systems are able to provide mothers and children with access to the full cascade of prevention services at all stages of transmission risk. In high-income countries, where this full range of services has been available since the mid-1990s, MTCT rates have been reduced to below 2 percent. Yet despite efforts over the past nine years in the developing world to implement prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) programs, only 45 percent of pregnant women in developing countries received medicines to prevent transmission to their children in 2008.
In the developing world, HIV-positive pregnant women confront many obstacles in accessing high-quality care for themselves and later their infants. Forced to navigate overstretched and under-resourced health systems, these women face many different risks in gaining access to the services necessary to effectively prevent transmission and quickly diagnose outcomes for their infants, as well as access continued care and treatment for themselves.
How CHAI Helps
Building on CHAI’s success in scaling up access to pediatric treatment, CHAI now is working to address these various points of loss with the goal of proving that by adopting a comprehensive approach to the full cascade of services, transmission rates can be dramatically reduced in the developing world.
To do this, CHAI is working with governments in six countries across Asia and Africa to help strengthen efforts toward:
- Pretest counseling
- Adequate testing and access to prenatal care
- Affordable and effective medicines for HIV-positive mothers for treatment or prophylaxis
- Safe delivery
- Affordable and effective medicines for exposed infants for prophylaxis
- Early identification of infected infants and access to early treatment
- Guidance on feeding options
- Continued maternal and child care
CHAI will support the provision of these services to all women in designated program catchment areas, while demonstrating the feasibility of bringing these services to scale.
