South African "Mentor Mothers" lower HIV infection rates among pregnant women

The Mentor Mother program trains women to provide health information and conduct home visits to pregnant women and to help the mothers raise healthier children. The incidence of HIV infection in South Africa tops that of any nation in the world, with some 6 million of the country's nearly 50 million residents infected. Sadly, young women — and particularly young pregnant women — suffer some of the highest rates of HIV infection. More than one-fourth of pregnant South African women are infected with the virus; in some communities, the infection rates are even higher. But those infection rates might be reduced — and the overall health of children improved — through community-based peer counseling programs, according to a new study conducted by UCLA's Mary Jane Rotheram-Borus, the director of the UCLA Global Center for Children and Families at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and her colleagues from Stellenbosch University in South Africa. A paper about the randomized controlled trial appears in the current edition of the journal PLoS One. The study found that having specially trained lay community mothers from the Mentor Mother Programme make regular home visits to pregnant women, and later to those mothers and their infants, led to significantly better health outcomes 18 months later in both the mothers and their children.