Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Feeding a Child When You Are HIV-Positive

WHILE breast-feeding is essential for child health, breast-feeding by HIV infected mothers significantly increases the incidence of HIV infection among infants.

According to the April issue of AIDS, breast-feeding causes nearly 40% of all paediatric HIV infections.



click to read more....

1 comment:

Ali said...

On this particular one, I recommend reading the entire article carefully - and youll coem across this bit:

:However, an April research by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of Zimbabwe shows that children who are not breast fed die more from diarrhoea and other infections.

Tumwesigye said it is therefore important to find ways of making breast-feeding safer for infants of HIV-infected mothers. One such way is exclusive breast-feeding.

This substantially reduces the transmission of HIV from mother to infant and infant death. Mixed feeding (alternating breast milk with supplements) damages the epithelial integrity of intestine and facilitates the entry of the virus."

Yes, you read that right. See the next couple of posts for more on that.