Supporting Infant Feeding in Families Living with HIV for Physicians

Can a parent living with HIV transmit the virus to their baby via breastfeeding? New research shows that for mothers on antiretroviral therapy (ART) with a sustained undetectable HIV viral load during pregnancy, the risk of transmission through breastfeeding is less than 1%, but not zero.

Understand how this new evidence impacts the advice you should provide to families with this updated course covering the most current recommendations, controversies, and questions regarding HIV and lactation, as well as how to guide families.

Instructor Dayna Hal, lBS, IBCLC, ICCE, ATC, provides global evidence and infant feeding recommendations for families living with HIV. She also addresses:

• barriers to formula feeding for families living with HIV in high-resource countries
• contraindications for breast/chestfeeding in families living with HIV in high resource areas
• current recommendations to prevent mother to child transmission for families living with HIV who prefer to breast/chestfeed

Lastly, she lays out a framework for counseling a family living with HIV to safely, exclusively breast/chestfeed.

Dayna Hall brings a depth of lived experience to teaching this course, as she has served in a hospital in South Africa where approximately one-third of the population is living with HIV and breastfeeding is advocated for every family.