Last year in Canada, there was only one case of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, which is in line with a continuing downward trend in that country, the Globe and Mail reports.

In fact, Canada has nearly eliminated the incidence of infants being born with the virus. “The World Health Organization definition of elimination is less than 2 percent transmission, and that’s where we are right now,” Jason Brophy, MD, MSc, an infectious disease specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa, told the paper.

Each year about 200 babies are born to HIV-positive women in Canada, but what has changed in the past decade is that about 90 percent of HIV-positive moms-to-be know their status and are on meds before they get pregnant. In the 1990s, only about 16 percent of women with HIV knew their status before they got pregnant. In addition, effective combination HIV therapy arrived in 1996.

Brophy is the chair of the Canadian Pediatric and Perinatal AIDS Research Group (CPARG), a group that has been tracking these cases since 1990. Findings from three CPARG studies were presented at the 8th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Vancouver, British Columbia.

According to one of the studies looking at the nearly 3,900 HIV-positive women who gave birth between 1990 and 2013 in Canada, 54 percent of them were foreign born, with most emigrating from Africa.

“The interesting pattern we see in this is the source countries over time really reflect what’s going on in the world around us,” Brophy said. “There are many countries of conflict and we get an uptick in the number of women from those countries as people flee.

“Canada’s perinatal HIV population really reflects global trends.”

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