Abstract
AIDS poses a potentially devastating threat to children’s health internationally. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in areas where the seroprevalence of HIV infection in women of childbearing age ranges from 10 to 25%, AIDS will lead to “an increase in child mortality by at least 25%; the gains achieved with difficulty by child survival programs over the past two decades may be nullified”(1). These tragically high seroprevalence rates already hold true for some areas in central Africa, as do the infant mortality rates associated with being born to a seropositive mother.-In Zaire, the infant mortality rate of children born to seropositive mothers was 21%, compared to 3.8% for infants born to seronegative mothers. Of the infants born to seropositive mothers who survived the first year of life, an additional 7.9% had developed clinical AIDS, thereby presumably contributing to higher 1-to-4-year child mortality rates (2).
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Heymann, S.J. (1991). Methods for Decreasing HIV Transmission to Infants. In: Chen, L.C., Amor, J.S., Segal, S.J., Anderson, J.M. (eds) AIDS and Women’s Reproductive Health. Reproductive Biology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-3354-2_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-3354-2_13
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