Site-specific interventions to improve prevention of mother-to-child transmission of human immunodeficiency virus programs in less developed settings

This article reviews the experiences of programs designed to provide access to prevention of mother-to-child transmission services with the goal of improving services in resource-constrained settings. The article reports new data from the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation’s prevention of mother-to-child transmission program in sub-Saharan Africa, which has provided human immunodeficiency virus testing to more than 1,300,000 pregnant women and antiretroviral prophylaxis to 134,000 human immunodeficiency virus–infected pregnant women and more than 78,000 human immunodeficiency virus–exposed infants. Review of qualitative program data highlights the practical innovations that sites are implementing to improve the uptake of prevention of mother-to-child transmission services.

Recommendations discussed include opt-out counseling and testing, rapid human immunodeficiency virus testing in antenatal care, counseling and testing in maternity, and provision of antiretroviral prophylaxis for mother and infant at the time of human immunodeficiency virus testing. Successful programmatic innovations need to be disseminated widely as more aggressive prevention strategies must be implemented to increase access to more than 10% of pregnant women worldwide.

Key words: human immunodeficiency virus, prevention of mother-to-child transmission, resource-constrained settings