In response to Alicia Dermer's question about pasteurizing breast milk when
a mother is HIV positive. I am not an expert on this, but happened to
attend the first WHO Expert meeting on this issue several years ago. (Chloe
O'Gara and I were the only breastfeeding advocates and were both sent as
agency observers. In the end we had to actively participate, as all the WHO
experts, though in principle in favor of breastfeeding, did not understand
how harmful the wording they kept proposing would have been.) A French
doctor reported that they had done research on this subject and found that
HIV was very heat sensitive and easy to kill. One only needed to heat to
about 56 degrees Celcius I think for about a half hour. This would kill the
virus without harming most of the ingredients of breast milk. However, I
have understood in recent years that in early breast milk the problem is
that breast milk cells are infected and presumably they would be harder to
kill, requiring a higher temperature I assume.

Ted Greiner, PhD
Senior Lecturer in International Nutrition
Unit for International Child Health, Entrance 11
Uppsala University
751 85 Uppsala
Sweden

phone +46 - 18 515198
fax   +46 - 18 515380

home phone +46 - 8 191397 (can be used as fax also)