""So does breastfeeding provide long term immunity or only temporary/short term immunity? We know about the long term benefits, but how does that relate to immunity specificly?"" This is an excellent question, that I hope there will be lots of discussion about! Here are a few of my, strictly non-scientific, thoughts. I have seen many examples of adopted babies who had been getting breast milk, but in smaller amounts than most babies whose mothers gave birth would have, whose health deteriorated noticably, when they stopped getting the breast milk. One was a baby born with bladder extrophy, who was very prone to urinary tract infection. Antibiotics gave her diarrhea, which burned the excess of exposed mucosal tissue, terribly. Her adoptive mother had lots of other children and was combining bottlefeeding and breastfeeding with the Lact-Aid. She felt that her daughter had only been getting maybe four ounces of breast milk a day. When the baby was almost a year old, mom decided to try putting away her Lact-Aids. The baby soon had a serious infection. After a few weeks of her daughter being miserable, she got her Lact-Aids back out and started nursing as much as she could. In a few days, she had some milk back, and her daughter started doing better. Realizing that the time spent breastfeeding was doing even more for her daughter's health than she had thought, she went ahead and kept breastfeeding several times a day until her daughter weaned herself at three and a half years. I think it was obvious, in that case, that the baby's immune system wasn't cutting it without the breast milk. However, I wonder if she had been exclusively breast milk fed for six months and then fed primarily breast milk for the rest of the first year, if her own immune system would have been better prepared to take over when she weaned. My youngest, Joanna, refused to nurse any more at 20 months ( At one time, I would have thought that was a VERY long time to breastfeed but, by this time, I was thinking "No, don't wean already!"). She had been very healthy, as long as she didn't get exposed to cigarette smoke, which I am allergic to, but caught everything for a while after weaning completely. It could have been a coincidence, but I don't think so. It impress me more because my milk had dried up dramatically, when I let the depo provera I'd had wear off. She had not even nursed every day after that, and I wasn't sure she was even getting one ounce of milk at a time. Anyway, to the question of whether the immunities coming from the milk in some way imprint the baby's own immune system, I wonder if it does to some extent. However, I would think having the baby getting immunities from mom avoids putting stress on the baby's own immune system, assisting it is developing properly. That is just a quess, of course, but I wonder if it might help explain the fact that people who have been breastfed as babies are so much less likely to develop immune deficiency diseases, like two of the three of my mother's kids. What happens in developing countries? Is there a weaning age at which children are much more, or less, likely to die? Is infection a common cause of death, or is malnutrition a bigger factor? Darillyn *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(R) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html