HIV Positve Women and Infants in Philippines

In 2015 there were a total of 30,356 recorded HIV infections in the Philippines, more than 80 percent of which were reported since 2010.Climbing HIV infection rates in the Philippines are bucking the global trend of decline. Among the Countries, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Srilanka in the Asia-Pacific region, the Philippines saw the rate of new HIV infections increase by more than 25 percent from 2001 to 2011.

Increasing infections among injecting drug users combined with low condom use and high fertility rates have contributed for this increase, health experts worried.Children acquire the HIV virus through mother-to-child transmission.”Mother to child transmission is definitely an emerging problem,” said Genesis Samonte, head of the Department of Health HIV/AIDS surveillance unit.

Of the 84 children who acquired HIV through mother-to-child transmission since 1990, 17 – or one fifth – were reported in 2015 alone.”Judging from the number of pregnant women we see in the clinics who test positive, this is definitely an underreported number,” Samonte said.At this current rate, the health department predicts that the total number of HIV infections will grow to 133,000 by 2022.