News

Mother-baby HIV box aims to reduce transmission

11 November 2010

It’s no great medical breakthrough, just a simple colour-coded box packed with HIV drugs and pictures, but Unicef hopes it may help finally end transmission of HIV to babies.

The box contains all the medicines and instructions needed to protect an HIV-infected mother and her newborn, even if she never visits a health clinic again until after the baby is born, and even if she can’t read properly.

The logistics of getting the right drugs to the right people at the right time is proving the biggest barrier in poorer countries to eliminating mother-to-child HIV transmission – a goal the United Nations has said it wants to reach by 2015.

At about $70 per box, the mother-baby pack costs less than half of what it would take to give even a year of drug treatment to an HIV positive baby, Unicef says. The idea is that the pack will simplify the procurement, ordering and distribution of drugs and healthcare since it is a one-stop-shop, with a complete course of medicines and instructions to halt mother-to-child HIV transmission.

The colour-coding and a series of simple pictures are designed to help women with low levels of literacy understand when and in what doses to take the medicines.

Unicef’s $8-million pilot project is planned in three phases, with around 30 000 packs to be distributed in each phase to reach almost 100 000 women by the middle of 2011.

Read the full article at Mail & Guardian and share your views in our Comments section below. More news headlines can be found in our News Archive.