My history with HIV goes back to my training in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when we started seeing infants infected through mother-to-child transmission.

Treatment was just beginning to come out at that time. Adults had access to one or more medicines — first AZT, then other medications in that class. We didn’t yet have a lot of information on the medication’s effects on children.

From 1997 to 2006, we had a Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Unit here in collaboration with St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.

By the late ’90s, we were beginning to see adolescents infected behavorially. If we had more access to schools and much more frank educational discussion about sex and risk factors, that could play a big role in preventing infection.

As far as mother-to child-transmission, we’ve really reduced that dramatically. In the U.S., it’s down to less than 1 percent. It’s now very rare.

Read the full article on mother-to-child HIV transmission by Dr. Greg Wilson at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center