In a message dated 1/1/2004 7:42:58 PM Central Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

> The saliva-through-the-nipple part is the myth. Think about the physiology
> of milk flow. How would the saliva or pathogens get INTO the breast? By
> swimming upstream, up the ducts?

Hi, again, Linda.
       Well, I'm thinking of the ultrasounds I've watched Peter Hartmann and
Donna Ramsey do.  Especially June 2003 in Amarillo, Texas.  The milk lets
down, but when it doesn't get out, such as the milk that is in the breast the baby
is *not* nursing on, it eventually goes backward up the ducts again.  We
watched it.  So that is one way that germs from saliva, that may have entered the
nipple pore towards the end of the nursing session on that breast so not
gotten washed out, could get moved up into the breast.  But then, I guess, the
antibodies would be present at the *next* feeding, rather than at that particular
one, if it might work that way.
       So I think this might be a way the germs from saliva could enter the
breast.  As to what mechanism might be present in the breast that could produce
antibodies on site, I don't know.  But the wonderful thing about our
breastfeeding knowledge is that it keeps changing.  (I love mysteries, which is why I
love helping mothers figure out their breastfeeding problems.)  After all, we
used to think there were milk sinuses and now we know there aren't, and we
used to think the ducts ran in rather straight lines from chest wall to nipple
and now we know they are more like strands of spaghetti that weave throughout
the breast.  So maybe we'll yet discover there really is something in the breast
that can produce antibodies.
       Dee
Dee Kassing, BS, MLS, IBCLC
Collinsville, Illinois, in central USA

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