I am still trying to catch up on three days of unplanned no mail.  Wading
through the RN/IBCLC thread to find the BF posts is a challenge and I for
one will be glad when we let this rest.  It seems we need to get a lot off
our chests (breasts?) about it but there comes a time when moving on has its
charm too.

on Thursday the 9th, Rosemary Gauld and Jean Ridler asked whether Lactnuts
in other places are seeing an increase in breast infections.  For what it's
worth, the numbers of women admitted to hospital in Norway for breast
infections is on the rise, by about 15% over the last 5 years here,
according to numbers I saw at a conference last week.  I realize that not
all serious infections are abscesses but I am making the assumption that
abscesses would warrant hospital admission as that is the usual practice
here.  Everyone has the same health service coverage, for better or for
worse, so the numbers do give information about what is happening in the
whole populace.  Since BF rates at hospital discharge have not changed in
that time and since most of these really bad mastitis cases seem to hit
early on, I see two possible explanations for the rise.

One is that the numbers of serious infections (and all abscesses fall into
that category) are actually rising.

The other is that doctors are reacting more appropriately now than a few
years ago, in the case of serious infections.  I have no information on
which to base a guess about which explanation is right.

Rosemary and Jean, does any facility you work with have the option of
culturing specimens from these womens' breasts to see whether there is a
particularly virulent strain of S.aureus or other bacterium causing this?

Rachel Myr, Norway
where a colleague's lactating daughter was just told by a doctor in a major
city that the fever, pain and redness on one breast which had recurred just
days after finishing a course of antibiotics for mastitis was a 'long term
post partum complication' and certainly not mastitis.  Her child will be a
year old next month and her pregnancy and birth were entirely without
problems.  So sometimes you can't even say in retrospect that birth is
normal!

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