In most countries people start treatment when their CD4 count is around or below 350- whether or not they are pregnant. Starting treatment soon is important both for your own health, and to make it less likely that your baby is infected.<\/p>\n
Because your CD4 count is at the level where most people start treatment it is unlikely you would stop ARVs after giving birth. You should expect to continue taking ARVs for life once you start. You can read more about starting treatment in our\u00a0Introduction to combination therapy guide<\/a>.<\/p>\n Although it’s normal to be worried about starting treatment ARVs can help you to live a long an healthy life. ARVs are much easier to take than they used to be and side effects are usually mild, and easy to manage.<\/p>\n If you’ve just found out you are HIV positive this can be a lot to deal with. Do you have any support to help you cope with this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am 17 weeks pregnent and i found out that I’m positive 3 weeks back. <\/p>\n Last week i went for my CD4 count and found out that it is very low @ 159. now i don’t like pills and i want to find out if i start taking ARVs now and monitor my CD4 count until i deliver my baby and then stop taking ARVs, will that be a wise decision?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,19,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-topics","category-newly-diagnosed","category-pregnancy","category-starting-treatment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8698\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}