Four hundred seventy-five women were enrolled in the study. These women were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group received zidovudine while the other, the control group, received a placebo. The administration of either zidovudine or placebo began in the second trimester of pregnancy and continued through labor. For six weeks after birth, the babies received the same treatment as the mothers in a syrup form. Because it was a double-blinded study, neither the researchers nor the patients knew who was actually receiving the zidovudine. Only three hundred sixty-four babies of the four hundred twenty-one born were available for testing. Results showed that, "of the three hundred sixty-four available for testing, fifty-three were infected with HIV; thirteen were born to mothers receiving zidovudine and forty to mothers on placebo" (FDA Consumer 3). According to this data, when both mothers and babies received zidovudine, there was a transmission rate of 8.3 percent. This was a dramatic decrease in the rate of transmission when compared to the control group who had a transmission rate of 25.5 percent. With results such as these, drug intervention with respect to both pregnant women and newborns should become more commonplace with each day. For example, if the decrease in maternal transmission rate is duplicated from the AIDS Clinical Trials Group study, and the estimated seven thousand HIV-infected women deliver infants while accepting treatment with zidovudine, one will conclude that "under these hypothetical conditions, as many as two-thirds, or twelve hundred, of all vertically acquired HIV-infections could be prevented annually"(Davis 15). This decrease in maternal transmission would be ideal if all conditions were met, but there seems to be one major flaw. Many pregnant women do not know they are infected with HIV. The problem now is how to identify HIV-infected pregnant women at an early enough stage, so that the use of AZT could drastically reduce the chances of the baby being born with HIV.