
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, November 13, 1995                   TAG: 9511130114
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

DOCTORS: DON'T TREAT BABIES OF HIV MOMS

Hundreds of doctors say they would recommend withholding expensive medical care from babies born to HIV-infected mothers even when they didn't know whether the baby actually had the AIDS virus.

Most babies born to HIV-infected mothers do not develop the virus.

The findings, reported in Sunday's American Journal of Public Health, are ``shocking,'' said Arthur Ammann of the Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

New York researchers studied 951 neonatologists nationwide to determine how they would treat newborns who had such expensive-to-treat conditions as kidney or heart disease in addition to being born to HIV-infected mothers.

Some 700 neonatologists said they would recommend withholding certain aggressive treatments, such as cardiac surgery or kidney dialysis, from babies who definitely have HIV. And 400 of the doctors said knowing the mother was infected would alter their treatment decisions even if the baby's own HIV tests weren't complete.

The doctors were surveyed in 1991, and there is no way to know whether their opinions have changed, acknowledged the study's author, Betty Wolder Levin of the City University of New York.

But some AIDS activists said doctors may be more reluctant to offer expensive therapy to infected babies today because of growing pressure to cut health costs. Ninety percent of HIV-infected children get their health care from Medicaid.

About 25 percent of mothers with HIV infect their babies, and women can cut the risk by two-thirds by taking the drug AZT during pregnancy. Doctors often don't know for several weeks which infants are infected, because babies are born with their mothers' immune cells.

by CNB