I didn't get to see most of the polio TV special, but I was in and out of
the room several times.  I didn't hear what the documentary said about
immunities from the mother, and my husband (who was watching but also
reading TIME Magazine at the same time!) tells me it wasn't clear if they
meant mother's immunities through the *placenta* or through breast milk.

I can tell you that polio, while officially "gone" from the Western
Hemisphere (North, Central and South America) is alive and thriving in
Africa and Asia.  In Mali, where 100% of the children in the community where
I did research from 1981-83 were breastfed, there were a significant number
of children with polio.  This is a disease which causes devastating loss and
pain and those it doesn't kill it leaves crippled, often for life.  So . . .
simply breastfeeding doesn't prevent you from getting polio all the time.
but the fact that all the mothers were breastfeeding may account for why
most children didn't get it (or weren't affeccted by it), in contrast to the
epidemics of the US in the 1940s and 1950s.

Signed,
Kathy Dettwyler, among the first to get polio vaccine in the late 1950s
Mother of Miranda Dettwyler, among the last to get a smallpox vaccine in 1981