Functional ingredients can allow infant milk to prevent HIV transmission, it is claimed.
Giving HIV drugs to babies as functional ingredients in their milk - and offering breastfeeding mothers highly active treatment - is safe and can help prevent transmission of the virus, says a new study.
Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine found that feeding breastfeeding infants daily with a syrup containing antiretroviral ingredients or treating their mothers with antiretroviral drugs both helped limit infections.
The death or infection rate among those infants who received no treatment was roughly double that of those whose mothers received treatment.
Those who were fed the syrup directly as functional ingredients in their milk had an even higher survival rate.
The study's lead investigator Dr Charles van der Horst said that the treatment could spare mothers in the developing world a "horrible choice" of choosing to continue breastfeeding or relying on an unsafe water supply.
Of the 420,000 infants infected with HIV every year around half were infected with it through breast milk, says the study.
First established in 1879, UNC School of Medicine says its mission is to be the leading medical school in the US.
