The growing impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on children born to HIV-infected women.

The increasing numbers of children born to HIV-infected women poses formidable problems for maternal and child health programs throughout the world. Between 20% and 40% of these children will be infected with HIV and most are expected to die by the age of 5 years as a result. The vast majority of the uninfected children will be orphaned before age 15 years as their mothers and fathers die of AIDS. By the late 1990s, several hundred thousand children will be born annually to HIV-infected women in developing countries, with the majority in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia compared with a few thousand in North America.