Dear Friends:

Learning about HIV/AIDS and breastfeeding is an eye-opener.

For one thing, the evidence that breastfeeding transmits HIV is weak. For
another, the testing for HIV is varied and unreliable. For another, there
are a significant number of esteemed and respected scientists doubting that
HIV causes AIDS....and they have reasons for their beliefs.

In the states, one positive HIV test will damn a dyad forever. Even when
subsequent testing yields negative results, babies have still been taken
away from their mothers by Child Protective Services ("because the mother
might breastfeed her baby")
and put into foster care or been made wards of the Court. The notion that
testing a newborn for HIV gives any useful information has since
been disproven, because the test results will reflect the mother's immune
system status, and not her baby's. That is the reason I suggest that women
should refuse to have themselves and their newborns tested for HIV.

AZT is a toxic drug and makes people that take it sick. (It does make the
company that sells it very healthy via profit.) Not every person with HIV is
sick. Yet mothers are expected to use formula and give toxic drugs to their
babies (a guarantee of sickness) rather than breastfeed, which (from the
evidence) seems to give babies the best chance at healthy survival.

This is another arena where fear and hysteria have driven policy, despite
 research showing that human milk protects babies from illness. Anna
Coutsoudis is one credentialed researcher who has done lovely research
showing that it is the babies receiving mixed feeds that are at highest risk
of contracting HIV. Is that because their resistance to virus exposure is
lessened because of their  immature immune system being unable to cope with
a daily onslaught of alien protein plus the virus?

Currently, there are more questions with HIV and breastfeeding than there
are answers.

Check out <www.anotherlook.org> There are a number of well-researched and
thoughtful position papers available for free download (including one by our
own Pamela Morrison).

After listening to Marian Thompson speak, I came away feeling that
breastfeeding and HIV is a topic similar to the bed-sharing issue in several
ways. One, that the underlying message is that mothers are dangerous for
babies, and only "experts" have the answers. The other is that fear and
hysteria drive policy, rather than evidence.

Evidence grows and changes and should trump commercial interests and fear.

warmly,

Nikki Lee RN, BSN, Mother of 2, MS, IBCLC, CCE, CIMI
craniosacral therapy practitioner
www.breastfeedingalwaysbest.com

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