"Exclusive breastfeeding" sometimes means nothing EVER other than breast milk across the baby's lips, so that once water or medicine or tea or butter or pureed prunes or formula or whatever has crossed the baby's lips, that baby is no longer "exclusively" breastfed. Other times, the phrase is used to mean the same thing, but only in the preceding 24 hours. In other words, if the baby has had only breast milk (and NOTHING else) in the previous 24 hours, then you can mark it as "exclusively breastfed." So a baby can start out formula feeding and work toward being exclusively breastfed. Some people don't like this second meaning of the phrase, but the World Health Organization uses it for their reporting surveys. It does lump together those who have never ever had anything else with those who, say at age 4 years, are sick, and so have only been breastfeeding for the previous 24 hours. Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html