Born with HIV

The important thing is that you understand enough about HIV to face any worries and understand how to look after your health.

You may be wondering what your HIV means for your health, whether it is still OK to have sex or whether you can do all the things other people do. This section will address some of these worries, with specific extra information for children, teenagers and young adults.

When you are born with HIV, this means that HIV was passed to you from your mother. This might have been while she was pregnant and you were in her womb. Or it may have been while you were being born or if you were breastfed.

HIV has to get from one person’s body into another.  It is passed on through only a few body fluids: blood, sexual fluids and breast milk. Find out more about HIV transmission.

In the UK all pregnant women are offered an HIV test, because if you know you have HIV you can now usually stop it from being passed on to your baby. Women who have HIV take medicine whilst they are pregnant and doctors will make sure she gives birth safely to protect the baby. After the baby is born, it is given some HIV medicine as well and is fed with formula milk instead of breast milk.

When you do all these things there is less than 1 per cent chance of the baby having HIV. Before these things were done, there would have been a much higher chance of a baby catching HIV from its mother. According to the World Health Organisation, the rate can be between 15-45 per cent if no interventions are made.

If you were born in a country which wasn’t able to do all these things, there would have been a higher chance of catching HIV. This is particularly a problem in poorer countries where there are not very good medical facilities.

It could be that your mother didn’t know she was HIV positive when she was pregnant, that she was finding it hard to cope or she had no way of accessing the medical help that she needed.

So sometimes it is just not possible to prevent HIV being transmitted from a mother to her baby.

If you were born with HIV you may feel sad or angry to know that it wasn’t possible to stop you being infected. Sometimes when people find out they are HIV positive they want to blame someone. These feelings are completely natural and understandable. If you find these feelings too difficult to deal with, you can contact THT Direct and ask to speak to an HIV Health Trainer or a counsellor.

The good news is that these days you can live a near-normal lifespan if you have HIV. This means that, if you take your treatment correctly when you need to, you should live nearly as long as a person who hasn’t got HIV.