Mother to child transmission of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Sociology - Gender Studies, grade: 1,15, LMU Munich (Soziologie), course: Reproductive Justice, language: English, abstract: This paper gives an overview of the mechanisms of mother to child transmission (MTCT) of HIV in Sub-Saharan countries and discusses why it still is a huge problem. It also shows what social and economic barriers occur when mothers, or to some extend people in general, try to access anti-retroviral treatments (ART). As research has shown, factors like social stigma still play a large role why so many people are not seeking help. Sub-Saharan countries still have an unproportioned part of the global HIV infection compared to the rest of the globe. The most common form of getting infected by HIV is by heterosexual contact, followed by MTCT. Even with the slowly declining numbers of infected people and people with no access to treatments, this still is a big issue that should be tackled and done more research on, especially on the mother to child transmission of HIV. MTCT contributes largely to the number of children affected by HIV by the age of ten and under. The author intents to point out why this should be worked on more and why factors like education and reducing social stigma should be advanced in order to enable a faster decline of vertical transmission numbers. Furthermore, basic mechanisms of MTCT are going to be explained and how it possibly can be prevented in every stage of the pregnancy. Additionally, the author clarifies why social, cultural, and economic factors play such a big role in fighting against HIV. The paper aims to show, how all these factors tie together and what future research could be done in order to reduce the number of people getting affected by HIV, especially infants and young people.