The province, however, responded quickly to this crisis. In less than a year, the MOPH had implemented this programme on a large scale in this relatively poor province. In the case of a positive test result, a confirmation test is performed at the provincial hospital. HIV-infected women are offered zidovudine during the 34th week of pregnancy or as soon as possible thereafter. Before starting treatment, a complete blood count of the woman is carried out.
Infants begin taking oral zidovudine shortly after birth and continue until they are one week old.
Subsequently, health centres regularly follow the infants, and volunteers provide case management of childhood illness, nutrition problem-solving, childhood immunizations, and home visits. The overall prophylactic coverage for the province reached 68 per cent of all HIV-infected pregnant women in the fourth quarter of 1997, either through the MOPH programme or through the North Thailand Perinatal HIV Prevention Trial, the parallel clinical trial conducted by the MOPH and the Ministry of Universities. Analysis of the data collected showed that compliance to the intervention was excellent, around 90 per cent. This cost represents less than 1 per cent of public health expenditures in Thailand. This puts to rest one of the main fears about trying to introduce the simplified regime into routine mother and child health services.