Human immune deficiency virus (HIV) infection during pregnancy at Gadarif hospital, Eastern Sudan.

This was a prospective study conducted on all pregnant and parturient women attending Gadarif Maternity Hospital, Sudan from January 2009 to December 2013 to investigate the maternal characteristics, pregnancy outcomes and estimate of maternal to child transmission of HIV among HIV infected women. During the study period, there were 26 HIV positive mothers among 6420 tested women yielding an incidence rate of 0.4%. The majority of these 26 infected women were of urban residence (69.2%), presented with normal CD4+ T cell count; ? 350\cu. mm3 (96.2%), had less than secondary education (57.7%) and housewives (84.6%). The mean age (SD) was significantly varied between the sero-positive and sero-negative women, 25.9 (5.7) vs. 36.1 (5.7), p = <0.001. More proportion of infected women had maternal anaemia and gave preterm birth, and none of the newborn babies was HIV infected until the age of 96 weeks. It is thus HIV infected women in eastern Sudan were young and likely desire more children.