Bulawayo’s efforts to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV face serious challenges, with low antenatal care (ANC) booking rates and late HIV testing among pregnant women emerging as major risks to achieving national and global targets by 2030, the National AIDS Council (NAC) has said. Giving a Bulawayo Programmes Update to the media recently, Bulawayo NAC Programmes Officer, Douglas Moyo, said close monitoring of the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT) programme was critical if Zimbabwe was to meet its long-term HIV goals. “It is very critical as we journey towards 2030 Hence, we need to closely monitor this PMTCT programme.
If we are seeing some gaps in this programme, that means we might even fail to meet our 2030 goals,” Moyo said. He said data collected across the city showed worrying gaps at different stages of the PMTCT cascade, starting with ANC booking. “According to the data that we collected, against the expected number of pregnancies, in the whole of Bulawayo, you can see that we had 50.5 percent booking for ANC,” said Moyo.
He said while some women booked early and already knew their HIV status, a significant proportion were still being diagnosed during pregnancy or even at delivery. “And then out of those, we had women who were actually booking with a known HIV status. 9.2 percent of women became pregnant when they already knew their HIV status,” he said.
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However, Moyo said the most worrying group was women who only tested for HIV once they were already pregnant. “Then we have the last part of that cascade, which is worrisome when we talk about the PMTCT, which is the newly diagnosed women. These are women who are testing for HIV when they are already pregnant.
As you can see, it says new HIV positive identified 3.5 percent, which is worrisome,” Moyo said. The NAC programmes manager explained that this pointed to a broader challenge of women not accessing ANC services early or at all. “If you look at that cascade, it is telling us that we have quite a number of women who do not go for ANC or book for ANC when they are pregnant.
These are the women who would actually walk into a labour ward, already in labour, to deliver,” said Moyo. Moyo said the core concern within the PMTCT programme lay in primary prevention, particularly making sure women of childbearing age knew their HIV status before pregnancy.
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