UN enlisted to tackle HIV-baby crisis
The Government is to seek help from UN experts in an effort to cut the transmission of HIV through childbirth.
A health programme will focus on Henan, one of the provinces worst hit by Aids.
Public education centres will be set up in Xinyang city's Shihe district and in Maidian city's Shangcai county under an agreement reached by Unicef and officials from the Health Ministry and their colleagues in the provincial Government.
An information official with Unicef's Beijing office, Charles Rycroft, hailed the agreement. 'Unicef is the first UN agency to be invited to work with HIV/Aids in this area. An international consultant has also been hired to help plan a wider approach to the mother-and-child HIV care issues nationwide and for the project in Henan,' Mr Rycroft said.
The centres will focus on providing screening, health-care information and modern medical techniques to reduce transmission of the virus in the womb.
'An estimated 600,000 newborns [worldwide] will begin their lives each year carrying HIV acquired from their mothers, a virus that will kill many in infancy and allow few to survive beyond adolescence,' Dr Dennis Blakeslee wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
'But with drugs and proper obstetrical care, rates of [mother to baby] transmission of HIV can be reduced substantially and, in some settings, transmission can be eliminated almost entirely.'
According to a Xinhua report last week, the centres would be established in Henan because of the legacy of scandals in which poor villagers became infected with HIV after selling their blood.
Alarming numbers of Chinese became infected through such practices in the mid 1990s, in which sellers' blood was put into a centrifuge to extract plasma, with the remaining pooled blood pumped backed into the sellers.
The Xinhua report said these practices by illegal blood traders were banned in 1995, but official media continue to report on new cases.
The Henan programme will target pregnant women and their partners who sold blood in the mid-1990s. Women at risk of infection through other means also will be screened.
A specialist assisting Unicef said the Henan centres would provide free treatments of combination Aids drugs to HIV-positive women and their babies.
Through the new programme, advisory networks would be created in each county and village to train personnel from local hospitals and family planning centres about mother-to-child Aids transmission, Xinhua said. Women at risk would be tested for HIV and those infected told how they could protect their health.
Dr Blakeslee, in his article, said stopping breast-feeding could help prevent transmission after birth.
Meanwhile, Henan's Jiefang District Court in Jiaozuo county has just awarded 170,000 yuan (HK$160,000) in compensation to the surviving family members of a man who died from Aids in 1995 after receiving a tainted blood transfusion, the Legal Daily said.
