UNAIDS goal of reducing new infant infections to fewer than 20,000 per year. Unfortunately, we missed that goal – and we missed by a lot.
The global health community must now redesign its HIV programs to meet this target, and new modeling suggests that expanding women’s access to contraception might be the key.In 2019 there were an estimated 150,000 new HIV diagnoses among children under the age of nine, the vast majority of which resulted from mother-to-child transmission (MTCT).
HIV can be passed to infants during pregnancy, delivery, or breastfeeding. Fortunately, the risk of MTCT decreases substantially from 15-45 percent to less than 5 percent if women are on treatment for HIV.