This  from nurses.medscape.com:


Breast-Feeding Cuts Risk of Respiratory
Disease

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters Health) Oct 23 - Healthy children who
are breast-fed are one third less likely to develop lower respiratory
tract infections compared with bottle-fed infants, according to a review

of the medical literature presented here on Monday at the American
Academy of Pediatricians' annual meeting.

"If you breast-feed for at least 4 months, your child will experience
one
third the risk of hospitalization for lower respiratory disease," lead
author Dr. Virginia Bachrach, a community pediatrician in Palo Alto,
California, told Reuters Health. The protection seems to last for the
first
year of life, Dr. Bachrach noted.

Dr. Bachrach said that 6% of all US infants younger than 1 year of age
are hospitalized annually for lower respiratory tract disease, which
elevates their risk for later illnesses, such as asthma, and creates a
costly healthcare burden.

Dr. Bachrach reviewed 31 published and unpublished studies that
examined the effects of breast-feeding on lower respiratory tract
disease. After limiting studies to those involving healthy infants who
had
been exclusively breast-fed for at least 4 months and who lived in
developed areas, the researchers pooled the data on 5000 infants from
7 studies.

The investigators found that children who were not breast-fed
exclusively had a threefold greater risk of lower respiratory tract
disease. The results were still significant after adjusting for factors
such
as socioeconomic levels and smoking, Dr. Bachrach noted.

Children who are breast-fed receive a boost to their immune systems
from their mothers, which may help them ward off infectious viruses that

cause respiratory illness, she suggested. "If public policy supported
women to breast-feed beyond the newborn period, infant
hospitalizations rates would decrease," she said.

Karen Ianacone, RN, MA, CCE, CLC
mailto:[log in to unmask]

             ***********************************************
The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html