I received this article from Yahoo Breastfeeding group.



Breastfeeding Now Safer For Infants Of HIV-infected Mothers



ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2008) — An antiretroviral drug already in widespread 

use in the developing world to prevent the transmission of HIV from 

infected mothers to their newborns during childbirth has also been found 

to substantially cut the risk of subsequent HIV transmission during 

breast-feeding.

See also: 

Health & Medicine

HIV and AIDS 

Infectious Diseases 

Sexual Health 

Plants & Animals

Bacteria 

Virology 

Microbiology 

Reference

Transmission (medicine) 

Colostrum 

Premature birth 

Infant 

In a study presented Feb. 4 at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and 

Opportunistic Infections in Boston, an international team of AIDS experts 

reports that nevirapine given once daily to breast-feeding infants from 8 

to 42 days old decreased by almost half the rate of HIV transmission via 

breast-feeding at 6 weeks of age. The decrease occurred in comparison to a 

single dose of nevirapine given to infants at birth, the current standard 

of care. 

At 6 months of age, the risk of postnatal HIV infection or death in 

infants who received the six-week regimen was almost one-third less than 

the risk for infants given only a single dose. The study was led by three 

teams of investigators at The Johns Hopkins University in collaboration 

with investigators in Ethiopia, India and Uganda.

Breast-feeding remains a leading route of HIV transmission in the 

developing world. The United Nations World Health Organization estimates 

that approximately 150,000 infants are infected through breast-feeding 

each year. In the United States each year, fewer than 150 newborns are 

infected with HIV at birth, mostly to mothers who did not know they were 

HIV positive.

The study, conducted from 2001 to 2007 and involving approximately 2,000 

infants, is one of the first randomized controlled trials to show that a 

drug can prevent HIV transmission to uninfected babies exposed to their 

infected mothers' breast milk.

According to Johns Hopkins scientists, the results are highly significant 

because the low-dose regimen of nevirapine was able to reduce transmission 

or death in breast-feeding infants. They note that the extended-nevirapine 

regimen appears to be as safe as the single-dose regimen.

The study is also significant, the scientists say, because it is the first 

to show that an antiretroviral drug can prevent HIV transmission through 

mucosal tissue.

This finding has implications for the potential value of antiretroviral 

drugs for preventing sexual transmission of HIV.

The six-week extended nevirapine trial, or SWEN study, included more than 

200 scientists and staff collaborating in many countries. The project was 

directed by Johns Hopkins investigators J. Brooks Jackson, M.D., M.B.A., 

and Laura Guay, M.D., with colleagues at the Makerere University/Johns 

Hopkins University Research Collaboration in Kampala, Uganda; by Andrea 

Ruff, M.D., with colleagues at Addis Ababa University in Addis Ababa, 

Ethiopia; by Robert Bollinger, M.D., M.P.H., with colleagues at BJ Medical 

College in Pune, India.; and Lawrence Moulton, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins, 

principal statistician for the study.

The SWEN study was funded by the Division of AIDS at the National 

Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the National 

Institutes of Health. Nevirapine is manufactured by the German 

pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim and sold under the brand name 

Viramune





Liz Maseth RN, IBCLC

Outpatient Lactation Services

Maternal Fetal Medicine

Akron Children's Hospital

(330) 543-4531

Fax (330) 543-4508

Pager (330) 914-0096

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