The mother's carnet de santé (health booklet) in Cameroon: a tool for preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV?
Résumé
In the global effort against HIV and AIDS, prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) in resource-poor countries is an issue of international importance. In Cameroon, a widely disseminated protocol defines the process to be followed by all pregnant women within the public health system before and after screening, whatever the result.
The protocol as a representation of professional practices can be discerned in inscriptions made in files, registers and the carnet de santé that we use here as the cornerstone of our analysis.
By granting it the status of a ‘script’ and intermediary object, we hypothesize that its purpose is to link together human and non-human actors around the PMTCT protocol in order to reduce the risk of mother-to-child transmission. However, as we show, representations and forms of interactions that are structured and reconfigured around it paradoxically contribute to the re-emergence of the risk of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.