Mother to Child HIV Transmission Prevention

I'm heading to the clinic in Sikoro today to begin our HIV testing of babies who were born to mothers who received medical therapy to prevent transmission of the disease at and after birth. This will be the first time that we will have any indication of the success of the program. I will post an update about my day at the clinic when I return this evening! Meanwhile, here is summary of the program from Dr. Anne De Groot.

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Chez Rosalie Mother to Child HIV transmission Project

As many of you already know, GAIA Vaccine Foundation already operates a mother to child HIV transmission prevention clinic in the village of Sikoroni within the borders of Bamako. Chez Rosalie is one of 12 such clinics in Mali, and the first in Sikoro. We knew that there were women who had HIV in the village we're working in who would never get tested and would, if tested, never travel to the "center of reference" several miles away to deliver. So we set up a mother to child transmission prevention clinic (Chez Rosalie) on site.


Chez Rosalie Update, July 2006 - Update by Annie De Groot


During my visit to Mali two weeks ago, I was presented with a summary of the first year of intervention by Dr. Malick Kone, and Dr. Adama Daou. Here is a brief synopsis of their results - 1440 pregnant women were evaluated for HIV infection at Chez Rosalie in the last year. 99% accepted the test, which means more than 1425 women were tested. 53 of these women were found to be HIV seropositive (3,7%). Of these 53, 19 women had delivered by the end of the 12 months - and 18 accepted Nevirapine treatment(Triple therapy was not given at this time).

This is amazing work and we celebrated it at the clinic - with the nurse midwives and the matrons who did most of the heavy lifting. We are amazed that the level of acceptance was so high - but there is one problem that we discovered - none of the mothers were yet on treatment and none had their CD4 T cell counts done to determine if they needed treatment. That is what we are trying to rectify with the Hope Center clinical project.

Meanwhile Victoria Albina is working on translating Dr. Adama Daou's "Memoire" about the year of work into English for publication, and she'll be adding her own insights about what it's like to implement Mother to Child Transmission prevention on the Front Lines as she is actively catching babies this summer at Chez Rosalie. Look for more information on MTCP and Chez Rosalie from Victoria next week.

Rajiv Kumar of Brown University, a medical student (who, coincidentally, helped found Adopt A Doctor and also campaigned to support GAIA with the Shape Up RI initiative this year) has traveled to Mali this week to help Dr. Malick Kone, GAIA Mali Director, and Dr. Ousmane Koita, our collaborator, to do HIV PCr and HIV testing on the babies that were born in the last year. We hope to be able to determine that the intervention that we put in place did in fact stop HIV transmission. We look forward to hearing from Malick and Rajiv about the HIV testing results.