Drug Protects Fetus From Hiv

The antiviral drug AZT largely prevents mother-to-child transmission of the AIDS virus even among pregnant women with relatively advanced HIV infection.

That was the welcome, although unexpected, finding of a study looking into an entirely different issue, officials at the National Institutes of Health announced Wednesday.

“This is very good news for infected pregnant women, and for their children,” said Lynne Mofenson, a pediatrician at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

One of the biggest therapeutic successes in the AIDS epidemic was the discovery several years ago that mother-to-child transmission could be cut from 23 percent to about 8 percent if AZT was given to pregnant, HIV-positive women in the final weeks of pregnancy and during delivery, and if the newborn then got the drug for the first six weeks of life.

However, the study proving that involved healthy women whose immune systems weren’t yet heavily damaged by the virus. Many AIDS experts doubted that women with more advanced disease would show the same magnitude of benefit from AZT. In fact, they theorized that sicker women would transmit the virus to their infants in 11 percent to 15 percent of cases.