The Nation : Congenital AIDS on Rise

AIDS has become the most common infectious disease in newborn infants in some parts of New York City, and the disease is spreading rapidly among children even as the adult AIDS epidemic slows, researchers said. Fighting the spread of children’s AIDS may be especially difficult because most infants with AIDS are born to mothers with no outward signs of disease, said Dr. Howard Minkoff, director of obstetrics at the State University of New York-Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. Of 34 mothers whose babies were born with AIDS at Minkoff’s hospital, only four had any symptoms of acquired immune deficiency syndrome or an AIDS-related complex known as ARC, a milder form of the disease. The mothers were the source of the AIDS infections in their children, however, and some of them later developed the disease, he said.