Mary brought up an excellent point, "I don't understand how anyone can give
the numbers for breastmilk transmission of HIV with confidence. All those
babies were born to mother's with HIV, and had pre and intra natal exposure
(unless the infection developed postnatally).So it seems like they would
have to extrapolate the data comparing breast fed and artificially fed
babies born to HIV+ moms.
Anyway it doesn't seem like very clean data."
Exactly! Especially when some non-breastfed babies have tested HIV- on PCR
at delivery and tested HIV+ any time from 0 - 90 days! I wonder how much
transmission of HIV is being blamed on breastfeeding when actually the baby
was infected before or during delivery?
Pamela Morrison IBCLC, Zimbabwe