Pregnancy Increases Risk of HIV Transmission

Anybody who has been pregnant knows how the body seems to almost turn against its owner, especially in the first and last trimesters. Drowsiness becomes the norm, cravings derived from the depths of insanity begin to swirl through the brain and, well, we won’t even begin to go into all the happenings in the nether-regions. Can I get an amen, ladies? Speaking of pregnancy and nether-regions….a new study is showing that women who are pregnant are at a greater risk of contracting HIV; in addition, men whose partners are pregnant and infected with HIV are also at a greater risk of contracting the infection themselves.

These findings were revealed at the International Microbicides Conference this year. During pregnancy, many women choose to continue sexual activities; however, although it is well known that if condoms are used both consistently and correctly, the risk of HIV infection is dramatically reduced, many women find it difficult to ask their male sexual partners to use a condom during sexual activities.

Specifics of the pregnancy study show that men are twice as likely to contract HIV from their pregnant infected partners. Over 3,300 couples from South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania and Botswana participated in this study. In each of the couples, one of the partners was infected with HIV while the other was HIV-negative. The findings revealed that men whose partners were infected with HIV had a greater chance of contracting HIV when their infected partners were pregnant. Nelly Mugo from the University of Nairobi & Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi suggests that the extreme physical changes that occur to a woman during pregnancy may cause her to be more susceptible to infections overall.

The study was conducted for over two years with over one thousand couples where the male was infected with HIV and over 2,200 couples where the woman was HIV-positive. Over the span of the two-year study, over 800 couples became pregnant giving the researchers more of a chance to study the HIV risks that could be caused by pregnancy. The results pointed to pregnancy increasing the risk of HIV transmission between partners. Of those couples that consisted of an HIV-negative female and an HIV-positive male pregnancy increases the risk of HIV transmission in addition to sexual behavior. On the other hand, in those couples where the males were HIV-negative and the females were HIV-positive, a much more distinct link was established between HIV-transmission risk and pregnancy. This link was drawn despite other variables that could be considered like the male being circumcised and the couple having unprotected sex. While the researchers involved in this study strongly believe that pregnancy and all the biological changes that occur because of it are the reason why HIV is more easily transmitted, they agree that more research needs to be conducted to solidify this hypothesis.