SOUTHERN AFRICA: A winning recipe for PMTCT but few follow it
A success story, at last: Botswana has lowered the rate of mother-to-child transmission of HIV to less than four percent, coming close to developed countries that have almost eliminated paediatric AIDS.
In Europe and the USA, fewer than two percent of babies with HIV-positive mothers are born with the virus; without intervention, the risk of an HIV-positive pregnant woman passing on the virus to her baby is between 30 percent and 35 percent, according to health specialists.
In Lesotho, transmission rates from mother to child are still as high as 37 percent; in Zimbabwe, 100 babies become HIV infected every day.
So how did Botswana do it? It was one of the first countries in Africa to establish a national antiretroviral therapy programme in 2002, and with a population of over 1.7 million people, optimal use of existing resources and a relatively sound health infrastructure, it was always going to be easier to get results.
Dr William Jimbo, chief advisor on prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV at the Botswana/USA health partnership (BOTUSA), also attributed the low rate of transmission to an effective cocktail of political commitment and bold policy decisions.
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