Hi. Perhaps I missed something during all the time I was nomail or because
I have a tendency to skim when I am behind (usual state of affairs, sigh)
- but the whole business of bloody stools in a young infant receiving
cow's milk either directly or through mom's milk was explained to me very
basically years ago by very bfing friendly neonataologist (former New
Yorker) at a Jerusalem hospital: the cow's milk acts as irritant in baby's
stomach, causing bleeding, hence blood in stool. Is this too simplistic?
My understanding is that a newborn digestive system is too immature to
handle cow milk well - face it, how many of us go out to graze when we get
hungry? Humans are not bovines. Milk is species-specific. Last I heard,
mutation still exists.

Seems to me that absolutely the first thing to do in a case of blood in
stool in a *young infant* (i.e., first few weeks) would be to eliminate
ALL non-human milk in nursing dyad diet! And this for 3 weeks. I shy away
from idea of elaborate testing for abnormalities such as "scoping" as
first-option, since the evidence for cow's milk being the black hat is so
great, and thus eliminating IT should be first-option. Am I beating a dead
horse here?

Further, IMO, the culture-change from breastfeeding to formula feeding led
to
increase in anemia in infants (because of bleeding from irritated
stomach-bowel) which in turn led to the protocol of necessity to give iron
to babies. Again, all this seems too obvious to me - again, am I missing
something or being too simplistic?

Confused in Beer Sheva, Judy Knopf

(Apologies for the rant. Sometimes I feel like Mr. (NOT Dr.) Spock's
sister - I look for, and NEED TO KNOW the logic behind things - and get
very impatient when people - here read "bf-UNfriendly doctors and nurses -
seem to switch off their brains....)