A federal panel
is recommending that all pregnant women, not just those
considered at high risk, be screened for HIV antibodies
because testing has proved so successful in helping to
prevent the spread of the disease to babies. The U.S.
Preventive Services Task Force said in 1996 that there
was insufficient evidence that screening all pregnant women
had any benefit. But the independent panel of medical
experts said in Tuesday's Annals of Internal
Medicine that scientific advances have changed
that.
"We're hoping
that this will encourage women to think of HIV testing
during pregnancy the way they think of all other testing
during pregnancy," said Diana Petitti, the task
force's vice chair and a scientific adviser for Health
Policy and Medicine for Kaiser Permanente Southern
California.
HIV-positive pregnant women can be given
combination drug therapies, have cesarean sections, or
avoid breast-feeding to help keep their babies
safe--reducing the transmission risk to as low as 1%,
the task force said. Otherwise, infected women have a
one-in-four chance of passing HIV on to their babies.
Of the 4.7 million women hospitalized for pregnancy or
childbirth in 2002, nearly 6,300 were HIV-positive.
Other groups
urged by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to engage
in regular, voluntary HIV antibody testing include men
who've had sex with men after 1975, anyone with
multiple sex partners, anyone being treated for a
sexually transmitted disease, current or former injection
drug users, people who exchange sex for money or drugs, and
people who had a blood transfusion between 1978 and
1985. (AP, with additional reporting by Advocate.com)