I am writing in response to Cindy, who wrote:

 > But, I must tell you, I am almost 32 years old.  I was born 6 weeks
early and weighed less than 4 pounds.  I was bottlefed.  I have taken
antibiotics twice in my life and get a mild cold, perhaps once a year.
 >
 > I am not less healthy than breastfed babies.
 >
 > There are people in existence who do not fit that profile.

Your logic reflects the flaws in relying on personal experience or
anecdotes.  Your, or my, personal experience may seem very real, and of
course, correct to us, but it doesn't always apply to whole
populations.  What follows is a crude example, with totally made up
numbers, but her goes.....

Let's say there is a rare kind of childhood cancer.  Suppose that with all
other factors being even, the incidence of this cancer is 5 cases per
10,000 children among formula fed children, and 2 cases per 10,000 among
breastfed children.  For  9,995 formula fed children, it seems like it
doesn't matter whether they were breastfed.  But for three children, being
breastfed may well have mattered very much.

There is strong evidence that formula fed infants experience more cases of
GI infections, UTIs, respiratory infections, otitis media, juvenile onset
diabetes, childhood cancers, Crohn's disease and on and on.  While any one
individual formula fed child may not develop any of these conditions, they,
as a group have many more illnesses.

I, too, was born five weeks early, weighing under four pounds, and was not
BF.  I was sick constantly as a child, but now rarely get sick.  I do,
however, have asthma and am significantly hard of hearing from a fever I
suffered as a toddler.  I would love to be able to hear normally, and I
always wonder what I might have accomplished had I been BF!

Please, please, do not take our comments to reflect on you personally, or
on how you were raised.  All of us might do well though, to remember that
anecdotes are not the same as population based studies.  That's why there
is such a push on for evidence-based medicine to guide our practices.

Most of the members of LACTNET know that conditions for BF families will
only improve when we live in a world where it is clearly understood what it
at stake when infants are deprived of their basic human right to be
breastfed.  Breastfeeding matters. to mothers, to infants, to families, and
to society.  We state that clearly and unequivocally, and I am proud of that.

Sincerely,

Janet DeCoopman
Milwaukee, WI

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