To combat malnourishment, HIV-positive mothers in Mozambique are being advised to breast-feed their children, despite the risk of transmitting the virus, AllAfrica.com reports.

According to the article, health officials discovered that a high percentage of children born to mothers living with the virus were malnourished and that breast feeding may be beneficial in dire circumstances.

“Under our conditions, we have no alternative but to advise the HIV-positive mothers to breast-feed their babies,” says Hemlaximin Nataial, a pediatrician at Maputo’s Jose Macamo General Hospital. “Most of these mothers have no financial capacity to purchase artificial milk. In other cases, the mothers have no conditions to treat the bottles and to prepare the milk with good quality drinking water.”

Nataial warns that untreated milk can cause diarrheal diseases and that the hospital’s pediatric ward is often overcrowded due to a high caseload of malnourished children.