HIV mothers may not infect their babies: Expert

JAKARTA (JP): Not all the babies of women infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) will be infected with the virus which causes AIDS, a senior doctor said yesterday.

"Those babies have a 15 to 40 percent risk of contracting the virus," said Samsuridjal Djauzi, a medical advisor at the Pelita Ilmu Foundation on Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

He said babies may become infected during pregnancy, delivery or breast-feeding.

"Most of the babies become infected during delivery because they have direct contact with their mothers' blood or amniotic fluid," Samsuridjal told The Jakarta Post yesterday.

Breast-feeding also increases the risk of infection, though it is not as great as that of the delivery process, he said.

He said that in some African countries, more babies of poor mothers with HIV died of malnutrition than of HIV infection.

"It's better for HIV mothers to feed their babies with milk substitutes than to breast-feed them, so that the risk is reduced," he said.

Health authorities here have recorded that five babies have been born from women with HIV. One of them, a healthy baby boy, was born at the Sanglah hospital in Denpasar, Bali, on Aug. 31.

Tuti Parwati Merati, the head of the AIDS prevention center at the hospital, said the baby was in a good condition. The hospital is yet to ascertain whether the baby is infected with HIV.

A blood test for HIV is normally conducted after a baby is 18- months old or more, Tuti said.

The other babies were from Bojonegoro and Malang in East Java, from Jayapura, Irian Jaya, and Jakarta. There are no reports on whether the babies are infected.

Samsuridjal cited a number of foreign surveys which have found that medical treatment could help reduce the risk of babies contracting HIV from their mothers.

"Treatment with a drug called AZT can help reduce the risk of mothers infecting their infants by up to 8 percent," he said.

Samsuridjal said it was difficult to conduct similar studies on babies in Indonesia because there were so few infected babies.

The doctor said that babies infected with HIV may die sooner than HIV-positive adults.

"Adults develop AIDS about five to ten years after they have been infected with HIV, but babies can develop AIDS within a year," he said.

"There was a baby who died six months after contracting the virus," Samsuridjal said. He did not say if the baby who died was one of the five infected Indonesian babies.

He suggested that women should be given more information on AIDS, in particular on medical treatment to lower the risk of HIV infection for their babies.

In July, the Ministry of Health reported that 420 people across the country were infected with HIV. Some of these are AIDS carriers. The number of infected people had risen 13 since June. (31/23)