An HIV/AIDS care foundation yesterday urged expectant mothers to be screened for the sexually transmitted disease as early in their pregnancy as possible, after reports of three new cases of mother-to-child HIV transmission last year broke the nation’s five-year zero transmission record.
“According to statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control [CDC], the number of mother-to-child HIV transmission cases has remained at 33 for several consecutive years, thanks to a 2005 government policy promoting HIV/AIDS screening for pregnant women that has prevented nearly 100 babies from contracting the illness,” Garden of Mercy Foundation chairperson Chang Shu-li (張麗淑) told a news conference in Taipei.
However, Chang said the three cases reported last year indicated that there was still a blind spot in the nation’s decade-long efforts to prevent perinatal transmission of HIV.
National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) pediatric infectious diseases physician Lu Chun-yi (呂俊毅) said one of the cases involved an infection prior to the 2005 policy and the parents only found out about the illness after their child started showing HIV symptoms at the age of 13.
“The child was adopted by another family. It was presumed that it could have been the failure of the child’s biological mother to be screened for HIV during pregnancy that caused the transmission,” Lu said.
The child later died of the disease, Lu said.
While the screening test policy has managed to encourage most pregnant women to get tested for HIV/AIDS, Lu said mothers-to-be who are financially disadvantaged, have a drug addiction or fear others knowing about their illness often slip manage to slip through the safety net.
NTUH Center for Infection Control case manager Shih Chung-ching (施鐘卿) said another case was detected after a child was three years old, because the mother was in the window period when she was tested.
Chang said that if a potentially HIV-infected neonate were to received pre-exposure anti-HIV medications and good care, the chance of the child becoming infected could drop from 40 percent to below 2 percent.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching