No evidence of vertical transmission of HTLV-I in bottle-fed children

• Autor(a) principal: BITTENCOURT, Achiléa L
• Data de Publicação: 2002
• Outros Autores: SABINO, Ester C., COSTA, Maria Cecília, PEDROSO, Celia, MOREIRA, Licia
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Revista do Instituto de Medicina Tropical de São Paulo
• Texto Completo: https://www.revistas.usp.br/rimtsp/article/view/30603
• topic: HTLV-I infection; HTLV-I vertical transmission; Transmission through breast-feeding; Diagnosis by PCR

The most frequent pathway of vertical transmission of HTLV-I is breast-feeding, however bottle fed children may also become infected in a frequency varying from 4 to 14%. In these children the most probable routes of infection are transplacental or contamination in the birth canal. Forty-one bottle-fed children of HTLV-I seropositive mothers in ages varying from three to 39 months (average age of 11 months) were submitted to nested polymerase chain reaction analysis (pol and tax genes). 81.5% of the children were born by an elective cesarean section. No case of infection was detected. The absence of HTLV-I infection in these cases indicates that transmission by transplacental route may be very infrequent.