Are all children born to an HIV+ mother automatically HIV+ themselves?
No. All babies born of positive mums are born with antibodies to HIV, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are infected themselves. Once born, sophisticated blood tests (such as the PCR tests which look for genes of the virus in the blood and not for the antibodies) make it possible to tell at an early stage if a baby is infected. We can now be over 99% certain about the diagnosis by the time the child is 3 to 4 months old. In uninfected children, antibodies to HIV are usually undetectable by 15 to 18 months of age.
