Someone just sent me a copy of a Science News article that is very good.
The date of the magazine is April 15, 1995, Vol 147.  If any of you have
access to such past publications, its worth seeking.

I wish I had a scanner to sent it to you.  I'll try to write some of the
highlights:

Reporting in Atlanta at Experimental Biology '95, several teams confirmed
this week that mother's milk indeed delivers not just antibodies, but a
battery of additional infection-fighting agents.

Among them are retinioc acids, a family of vitamin A derivatives. ...Charles
E. Isaacs emphasizes that the retinioc acids don't kill herpes.  His group
selected this virus to model the likely responses of many others.  "But by
slowing down the rate of viral replication you're helping the immune
system," he notes.  "With retinoic acid in your body, you might have to
fight only 50 virus particles instead of 50,000 or 100,000.

Olle Hernell of the University of Umea, in Sweden and his coworkers focused
on Helicobacter Pylori.  This bacterium, responsible for many stomach ulcers
in adults, can also infect children.

...The researchers tested the glycoprotein kappa-casein, one of the two
primary proteins in breast milk, in cultures of the mucus-secreting cells
that line the stomach.  They found that H.pylori didn't attach.

In the GI tract of children receiving kappa-casein from mother's milk, Bo
Lonnerdal now suspects, the bacteria would also wash out instead of
attaching--and therefore become harmless.

Although cow's milk contains even more kappa-casein than breast milk, the
bovine form doesn't have any effect whatsoever on the virus, Lonnerdal says.
Why Not? Because the cow's glyco-protein has a different carbohydrate.

Breast milk also contains large quantities of interleukin-10 (IL-10), an
immune system molecule that inhibits inflamation, reports Roberto Garafalo
and his colleagues at the University of Texas Medical branch in Galveston in
the April Pediatric Research.  Inflamationn is one way the body fights
infection.. But sometimes the body fights too aggressively, and healthy
tissue succumbs.  Indeed one reason GI disease can be so devastating to
infants is that the inflammatory process tends to get carried away.

At the meeting, Garafolo described preliminary data suggesting that newborns
do not produce IL-10 as effectively as adults.  He says that may help
explain the significance of another of their findings: that colostrum
contains the most IL-10.

The emerging picture indicates that mom's milk offers a host of beneficial
chemicals that probably work in concert with antibodies to protect babies
from life-threatening infections.
________________________________________________

There are several important patterns in this research.  The one that stands
out to me is that finding a component in human milk and then adding it to
altered cow's milk doesn't enhance the health-giving properties of that
artificial milk.

Patricia Gima, IBCLC
Milwaukee
mailto:[log in to unmask]