Some time last week (or so), someone posted a question about the costs of
making kids better when they could have been saved from such illness
through breastfeeding. (hope you get my drift)

Here is information from Jan Riordan who has been doing research on the
costs of various medical diagnoses for children.

Infant diarrhea:        $630 million*
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV):      $31 million
Insulin dependent diabetest mellitus (IDDM-in childhood):       $72 million
Otitis media:   $660 million

These figures are for ONE YEAR, US dollars; actual expenditures based on
average costs and number of known diagnoses in each category.

She writes: "Results showed that breastfeeding saves $1.4 BILLIONS in
health care costs for only four medical diagnoses. Since it's known that
breastfeeding infants have fewer health problems in at least 12 DRGs, this
figure can be multplied four times to estimate total savings if women
breastfeed. Breastfeeding also improves intellectual development of
children, according to new medical research studies. The benefits of more
intelligent children on society are enourmous, even though it cannot be
directly measured in terms of dollars." (this co-owner would not be as
computer literate without the help of my brilliant offspring! :-)

Not covered in the above figures is the costs of certain DRGs specific to
women's health, such as reduced likelihood of premenopausal breast cancer,
adult onset IDDM (which is more likely in women who have gestational
diabetes and then DO NOT breastfeed), ovarian cancer, and so on.  We need
to collect those data as well.

Hope this helps whomever was asking.



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 %% "We are all faced with a series of great opportunities      %%
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 %% Kathleen G. Auerbach,PhD, IBCLC - [log in to unmask]          %%
 %% Homewood, Illinois USA                                      %%

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