UNC’s Dr. Charles van der Horst and faculty of the UNC Division of Infectious Diseases collaborate on the paper entitled “Maternal or Infant Antiretroviral Drugs to Reduce HIV-1 Transmission…”
The paper entitled “Maternal or Infant Antiretroviral Drugs to Reduce HIV-1 Transmission “ involves a large number of investigators, spearheaded by faculty of the UNC Division of Infectious Diseases and Charles van der Horst M.D. as senior author.
The study, carried out with mother-infant pairs in Malawi, sought to evaluate antiretroviral therapies to reduce postpartum HIV transmission during 28 weeks of breastfeeding. Without therapy, 5% of infants are HIV-positive at 2 weeks of life. This infection rate was reduced by 50% in the maternal-regimen cohort and even more in the infant-regimen group. Since WHO recommends breastfeeding for at least 12 months in this setting, relatively inexpensive daily nevirapine prophylaxis of infants appears to be an effective and practical regimen to reduce transmission of HIV. Critical to providing the data for the study, and a coauthor of the paper ,is Dr Susan Fiscus of our department. Dr Fiscus has been Director of the UNC Clinical Retrovirology Laboratory for many years and has long maintained a special interest in mother-child transmission of HIV.