At the recent Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, an international team of AIDS experts reported that a drug administered once daily to breastfeeding babies from eight to forty-two days old decreased the rate of HIV transmission by breastfeeding at six weeks of age.  This is one of the first randomized controlled trials to show that a drug can prevent HIV transmission to uninfected babies exposed to the breast milk of a mother with HIV.  According to researchers, the results of this study have demonstrated that the  administration of the drug nevirapine was able to reduce transmission or death in breastfed babies.  This is also the first study to indicate that an antiretroviral drug can prevent HIV transmission through mucosal tissues.   Nevirapine is a drug that is commonly used in combination with other medications to treat human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in patients with or without acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).  This research was conducted from 2001 to 2007 and involved over two thousand infants, three teams of researchers at The Johns Hopkins University, and researchers Ethiopia, India and Uganda.