""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

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