In Chandigarh, a number of HIV-positive women have given birth to healthy babies in a government-run hospital, a state health official has said. A multi-medicine treatment process has worked on as many as 213 women as they yielded better results having given birth to healthy babies.
“The health department is committed to secure the child from infection in the womb of an HIV-positive mother,” Chhattisgarh’s health services director R Prasanna said. The HIV examination was conducted on as 3,93,475 pregnant women and of them, 232 tested positive.
Approximately 219 women who were HIV positive were provided with the treatment at government hospitals, he said. After their deliveries, the babies of 213 women were detected uninfected and healthy, Prasanna said.
However, infection detected in the remaining 6 children are being given medicines through the anti- retroviral therapy (ART) centres. ART is a combinational medicine of various antiretroviral medicines used to slow down the rate HIV viruses to multiply itself in the human body.
“The medicines for adults were broken into a standard dose to feed the children. All the ART and link ART centres had followed the directive. Neither the child patients nor their parents had to face trouble (during a shortage of medicines),” he said.
