• Submitted by: Juana
• Health and Medicine
• 07 / 01 / 2015

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In a ceremony at the headquarters of the Pan American Health Organization in Washington, WHO has delivered the first certification in the world to a nation for having eliminated the mother-to-child transmission of HIV and congenital syphilis.
According to WHO parameters, it is considered that a country has eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV when less than two infected descendants are documented, per hundred births of mothers infected with the virus. In the case of syphilis, statistics should reveal less than 0.5 cases per thousand births.
Every year, between 15% and 45% of the 1.4 million HIV-positive women who become pregnant can infect their children during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding unless they receive proper medical treatment. With a supply to the mother of indicated retroviral, the infection rate drops to a remarkable 1%. Getting the disease and its passage to the next generation curbed is a major challenge for all societies and medical and scientific communities that Cuba has managed to overcome.

source: www.cibercuba.com