Two days ago (nights, actually) shortly after I arrived home from another
trip out of town, I was alerted to a program on PBS local channel about
polio myelitis.  The program focused on the fear of the disease that was
rampant in the USA from 1916 (after the first major epidemic) through the
1950s when the Salk and (later) the Sabin vaccines became widely available.

Because my mother contracted polio when I was 4 and my brother 6 mo old, I
was very interested in what the program had to say.  I already knew about
the virus and how it was spread and how it was often called the "rich
persons' disease" because it tended to hit children and young adults in
what were often called "stable" families then, but I also learned all kinds
of other things.

#1: It also hit poor families.  Their traetment tended to be less complete
than that offered to more wealthy people (esp. if they were African
American).

#2: FDR opened Warm Springs, ARK to all manner of vicitims (he contracted
the disease when he was an adult).

#3: the researchers came to realize that "the babies no longer received
antibody protections from their mothers as infants.  Thus, they contracted
the disease as young children and young adults because they had no
protections early and thus no antibody protection from such exposure."
This statement made me sit up and take notice!  Do you interpret this as I
did?  That fewer women were breastfeeding and thus not passing on their own
antibodies to the babies, triggering immune response in the babies?

Statements about failure to pass antibodies from mother to infant were
mentioned SEVERAL times!

What particularly struck me about this was that the epidemics in the USA
began to increase at the same time that breastfeeding incidence and
duration was declining rapidly, particulalry in the middle-class and upper
class populations and in the cities.  Was this simply coincidental?  I
don't think so....

My thought for the day.

     mailto:[log in to unmask]

"We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly
disguised as impossible situations."
Kathleen G. Auerbach,PhD, IBCLC (Ferndale, WA USA) [log in to unmask]
WEB PAGE: http://www.telcomplus.net/kga/lactation.htm
LACTNET archives http://library.ummed.edu/lsv/archives/lactnet.html