I hope Betty Crase has the time to jump in here; she has done some
excellent investigating into this very figure and where it "came" from
and has presented on this topic a number of times. In my notes from one
of those sessions, she calls it "the elusive 5%...when an unsubstatiated
figure takes on a life of it's own." There really is NO research to
support that figure and she traced it back to two published articles:
one in 1938 in BMJ (Spence; the modern decline of breastfeeding) and one
from 1958 in NZ Med J (Deem,  H and McGeorge: Breastfeeding). I hope
that Betty doesn't mind that I jumped in here but this pushes my
buttons, too. I'm wondering if most of our recent fears stem from that
mess in 1994 that the Wall Street Journal article started.
Mary Kay Smith, IBCLC
Romeoville IL near Chicago - snow melting, getting warmer

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