How to care for HIV Infants

As the pregnancy of an HIV-positive mother is not much different from that of any other mother, the care of an HIV-positive infant is not much different from caring for any other infant. There are precautions to take, but the child doesn't have to be treated differently than any other child. An HIV-positive baby will need to take a greater amount of medications in his or her young life than children who don't have HIV, but beyond that, care will be mostly the same.

Instructions

• 1

  Visit an infectious disease doctor often. Pediatric HIV develops into AIDS much more rapidly than HIV does in an adult. This means that AIDS-defining illnesses - such as PCP, thrush and TB - can more easily infect infants who are HIV positive and can mean death if not treated quickly and aggressively.

• 2

  Feed the child often. Don't worry about a child being overweight. HIV-positive infants are often malnourished. Extra food will not hurt the child, as children who are HIV positive generally burn energy more quickly than other children. These infants may often have difficulties in feeding, problems such as loss of appetite and vomiting, and occasionally difficulty in swallowing.

• 3

  Test the child frequently. As an HIV-positive infant may be more susceptible to certain opportunistic infections, he or she will need to be tested for the more common and even less-common infections more frequently. Tuberculosis is one disease that HIV-positive infants are particularly prone to, and special care should be taken to ensure prevention and treatment.

• 4

  Use universal body-fluid precautions. This is important for both for an HIV-positive mother and other caregivers. If someone caring for the infant is also HIV positive, that person and the infant can re-infect each other, which can result in medication-resistant mutations in the virus. If the caregiver is HIV negative, the baby can still transmit the virus through blood-to-blood contact.

• 5

  Treat the virus early and aggressively. Statistics show that early treatment in HIV-positive infants reduces the risk of death by 76%. If treatment is put off until the infant's CD4 immune cell count is very low or until the child is experiencing multiple opportunistic infections, then the mortality rate is much higher.