14 DAY TRIAL // For tens of years, specialists advertise that the maternal milk "is the best and healthiest food" for the new-born.
Moreover, in poor countries, the risk for the newborn of dying because of diarrhea symptoms is 15 times higher for the babies fed by nipple than by breastfeeding.
In fact, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) warns that 4,000 children die daily because of affections linked to the replacement of the maternal milk.
But in the case of the seropositive mothers, the possibility for a child to be infected by maternal milk is of 14 %.
In countries where AIDS is rampant, like in the south Saharan Africa, 2 or 3 out of 10 pregnant women are seropositive. In a country from meridional Africa, more than half of the pregnant women were found to be HIV infected. Thus, using powder milk seems a logic alternative for HIV infected mothers.
But in the developing countries, where idealistic theories face harsh life realities, it's hard to resort to this simple solution.
One of the barriers is social. In countries where there is a norm for the newborn to be breastfed, when a woman uses a nipple to feed her baby, it's like announcing she's HIV infected. The woman fears she'll be blamed, abandoned or even beaten if people come to know that. So she will keep breastfeeding her baby.
In most cases of women from rural Africa (and 95 % of the African cases are from rural areas), they never succeed to make a HIV test, even if they suspect they carry the disease, as their children have died or are extremely weak and sickly. They continue to breastfeed their children, as the powder milk for a month most often exceeds the yearly income of the family.
And even if powder milk were for free, there would still be a problem: potable water for preparing safely the milk. This is hard to get, as many of these governments waste double for army than for health and education.
There are drugs that decrease the risk of HIV transmission from mother to child, like the antiretrovirals AZT or nevirapine, which could help annually 400,000 newborn to avoid the infection. This last one is a really cheap solution, it only costs 3 dollars...