I happen to beg to differ with the opinion that relactation is NOT possible during emergency conditions. UNICEF has developed some pretty clear guidelines for the steps necessary to determine which mothers to encourage and which steps to take. All one has to do was take a look at one of the new photos of a forlorn mother in New Orleans with a 3 day old baby (my colleague did the math to figure out how old the baby was from the article) with a nasty dirty bottle of formula to know that it is a no brainer to tell that mother to just keep putting her baby to the breast. That is quite different from the steps that one would take to relactate a mother of a six month old. That is not going to work during the initial phases of an emergency and anyone who has read any of the materials on management of infant feeding would realize that that is not what is proporsed. Moreover it is quite important to encourage CUP FEEDING under these circumstances rather than bottle feeding. You can clean out a cup much better than a bottle. Anyone involved in developing guidelines for emergency feeding protocols should first go to the protocols that have already been published for developing countries and ADAPT these for use in developed countries. Quite frankly the conditions in New Orleans are really not that dissimilar from emergency conditions elsewhere. There is a track record. There are people who have done the work on relactation and documents published by UNICEF and WHO and I'm sure La Leche League has good documents as well. There is a sensible approach including one flow diagram that I picked up that shows the decision points for choosing feeding methods. Of course, the protocols can be fine tuned and improved upon as with anything in life. If I were stuck in some stadium with no clean water I would have no hesitation going up to that mom of the three day old and saying something along the lines of what Paula Meier's does with her moms of premies - that this is life or death situation and if she hates breastfeeding she can stop the instant she gets to someplace where the water is safe. As for the pictures of the premie babies in the box, if I really could not have convinced the emergencies workers to not separate mom and baby - I would have at least made one of the emergency workers strip off his shirt and wrapped as many babies as possible around his body to keep them warm. Best regards, Susan Burger *********************************************** 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