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Florida winning an HIV battle

So far this year, no babies in the state have been born HIV-positive, a first since the epidemic began 20 years ago.

TALLAHASSEE - A battle in the war against AIDS - one involving its youngest victims - is being won in dramatic fashion.

The number of babies who contract the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS before or during childbirth has plunged in the last decade and so far this year no babies have been born HIV-positive in Florida, health officials said Friday.

It's the first time since the epidemic started about 20 years ago that Florida has gone nearly to the halfway point of the year without recording a case of mother-to-baby transmission of HIV, said Health Secretary John Agwunobi.

It's evidence that more pregnant women are getting tested and that antiretroviral drugs used during pregnancy and childbirth are working, he said.

"It's a huge AIDS success story," said Tom Liberti, the Florida Department of Health's HIV/AIDS bureau chief.

The story is similar nationwide, although it's not as clear. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn't have figures as current as Florida's. But even back in 2000, the last year for which the agency does have numbers, mother-to-baby transmission of the virus was down about 80 percent from its peak in the early 1990s, said CDC spokeswoman Jessica Frickey.

Florida's numbers give a strong indication of the power of the drugs that are given to pregnant HIV-positive women and a testament to efforts to find those women in the first place.

Last year, only eight babies were born HIV-positive statewide. That's down from 32 just four years earlier and significantly lower than about 200 cases in Florida in the years before it was discovered that antiretroviral drugs given to pregnant women could prevent transmission of the virus to their babies.

"Everybody who deals with pediatric HIV or HIV in general is very excited about this," said Dr. Catherine Lamprecht, pediatric medical director of the Hug Me program at Arnold Palmer Hospital in Orlando, which treats children and adults with AIDS.

The only real challenge now is identifying pregnant women who are HIV-positive. If they are found, it's now extremely likely that doctors can prevent the transmission of the virus with the drugs. Health officials say they're winning battles there too - with extensive outreach programs meant to find HIV-positive pregnant women. Florida officials say the state is a leader in that category, with possibly the largest publicly funded testing program in the country, conducting about 300,000 HIV tests a year.

Officials are going out looking for people, rather than waiting for victims to come to them, said Liberti.

"In places like jails and pharmacies and mobile vans . . . where teams of people of public health and community based organizations go out . . . and test people," he said.

Programs like Hug Me are doing that kind of work - the program has a nurse who goes out looking for HIV-positive women in obstetrics clinics and then gets them into treatment programs.

A new law signed last week by Gov. Jeb Bush is meant to further ensure that those women are found. It requires doctors treating pregnant women to schedule an HIV test as a matter of course, unless the woman objects.

"They make it part of the routine - they can still opt out if they want to - but the thinking is most women won't," said Jesse Fry, director of government affairs for The AIDS Institute.

Also Friday health officials announced another positive development in the war on AIDS: the number of new HIV infections among black people has dropped by about 30 percent statewide in the last six years. For black women, new HIV infections dropped even more significantly - 36 percent since 1998, said Agwunobi. New cases in black men have dropped 24 percent in the same time frame.

The decline in mother-to-baby cases is also perhaps most significant for the black community: of the eight babies born HIV-positive in Florida last year, seven were black.

[Last modified June 18, 2005, 00:45:19]