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Pregnant women to get HIV test
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Wu Yan
HIV tests will become compulsory in Shenzhen for pregnant women, a source from a meeting on disease prevention disclosed on Wednesday.
“All medical treatment institutions under the jurisdiction of the municipal public health bureau will be obliged to include HIV tests in their test items for these women. HIV-infected women should avoid getting pregnant. Those who are pregnant will not be allowed to carry out the delivery. We will absolutely cut off HIV transmission from mother to child," said Zhou Jun'an, chief of the SZ Municipal Public Health Bureau.
Data shows that the number of AIDS cases in Shenzhen grew rapidly from 1996 to 1999. But in 2000, the city government and its related departments tackled prevention and control of HIV and AIDS. The number of local HIV-infected people was brought down by 3.5 per cent against a reported nationwide increase in the HIV-infected and AIDS patients by 30 per cent over the previous year.
Among the city's detected HIV-infected people, 80.4 per cent are within the migrant population. The proportion of infected women is higher here than in the country as a whole, suggesting greater potential danger of mother-to-child transmission in Shenzhen.
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