Healio: PEPFAR funding directly reduces maternal HIV transmission, infant mortality
“Researchers said that annual funding of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief decreased infant mortality related to mother-to-child HIV transmission in Kenya by more than 10 percent. They suggested that when funding was examined on a cumulative basis, infant mortality dropped by nearly one-third. … ‘It has been estimated that without interventions such as those supported by PEPFAR in Kenya, approximately 35 percent of children will become infected with HIV before birth, after birth or while breastfeeding,’ [Donna Spiegelman, Dwight Bliss professor of biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health,] said. ‘Preventing HIV infection in these children is critical for full-scale HIV prevention and the end to the global AIDS epidemic'” (Bortz, 7/27).