Infants with HIV-infected mothers in a universal newborn hearing screening programme in Lagos, Nigeria.

Aim: To establish the characteristics of infants with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected mothers enrolled under a two-stage universal newborn hearing screening programme in Lagos, Nigeria.

Methods: A matched case-control study from May 2005 to December 2007 in which factors associated with maternal HIV status were determined by conditional multivariable logistic regression analysis.

Results: Some 266 newborns had HIV-infected mothers and were matched with 1330 controls by age and sex. Factors independently associated with increased risk of maternal HIV status were ethnicity, religion, housing sanitation facilities and prematurity while prior or current caesarean section, admission into special care unit and hyperbilirubinaemia were associated with lower risk of maternal HIV. Maternal HIV status was not significantly associated (p = 0.082) with the risk of sensorineural hearing loss although newborns with HIV-infected mothers had more than two-fold risk (p = 0.030) of not completing the hearing tests compared with controls.

Conclusion: HIV-infected mothers are likely to live in poor housing conditions but their newborns are not at an increased risk of sensorineural hearing loss in this setting barring the potential effect of significantly increased drop-out rate in this group.