>Barbara Wilson-Clay wrote,
>
>
> What is more of an issue than one mother packing up her own (hopefully cleaned
> up) equipment in between babies is for two different mothers to share
> equipment which may have been ineffectively sterilized or which may be
> impossible to sterilize.  I don't think we need to worry much about HIV,
> which, as others have pointed out is fragile outside of it's host.  However,
> lots of other possible contaminants could be problematic.

We don't need to worry aobut HIV and for that  would like to see HIV dropped
from the list of possible infections from used breast pumps for two reasons:

1) it is wrong, and it adds to misinformation that further adds to the
stigma of HIV infection AND prevents people from understanding what they
need to know to prevent HIV infection

2) I think it has the potential to create a credibility problem which makes
further discussion about real threats suspect.

Here is the information that I sent privately to a number of Lactnet members
who asked (and to was few who didn't ask!), about the fragility of HIV.

The CDC says the *theoretical* risk is "zero." Here is the CDC's basic info
page on HIV transmission. http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pubs/facts/transmission.htm

The relevant excerpt:

> Scientists and medical authorities agree that HIV does not survive well in the
> environment, making the possibility of environmental transmission remote. HIV
> is found in varying concentrations or amounts in blood, semen, vaginal fluid,
> breast milk, saliva, and tears. (See page 3, Saliva, Tears, and Sweat.) To
> obtain data on the survival of HIV, laboratory studies have required the use
> of artificially high concentrations of laboratory-grown virus. Although these
> unnatural concentrations of HIV can be kept alive for days or even weeks under
> precisely controlled and limited laboratory conditions, CDC studies have shown
> that drying of even these high concentrations of HIV reduces the amount of
> infectious virus by 90 to 99 percent within several hours. Since the HIV
> concentrations used in laboratory studies are much higher than those actually
> found in blood or other specimens, drying of HIV-infected human blood or other
> body fluids reduces the theoretical risk of environmental transmission to that
> which has been observed--essentially zero. Incorrect interpretation of
> conclusions drawn from laboratory studies have unnecessarily alarmed some
> people.
>
> Results from laboratory studies should not be used to assess specific personal
> risk of infection because (1) the amount of virus studied is not found in
> human specimens or elsewhere in nature, and (2) no one has been identified as
> infected with HIV due to contact with an environmental surface. Additionally,
> HIV is unable to reproduce outside its living host (unlike many bacteria or
> fungi, which may do so under suitable conditions), except under laboratory
> conditions, therefore, it does not spread or maintain infectiousness outside
> its host.

Jodine Chase

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