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

ABSTRACT

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 percent. 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 percent 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