Nofia: In Felicity Savage King's book Helping Mothers to BF, chapter 3 has a detailed explanation on how to calculate the cost of ABM feeding. She says that during the first month of life the baby needs 5 one lb. cans of formula, in the second month 6.5 cans and in the third, 8 cans each month through month six only. She has no calculation on pre-mixed, but the chapter in Auerbach and Riordan on "Tides in BF Practice" indicates that Jelliffe and Jelliffe estimated about 150 cans of pre-mixed in the first six months. After 6 months it is more difficult because food is being added. I've not seen any recent estimates of how many bottles and teats are used in a year. Cost of electricity would vary. In 1990, Sandy Huffman and Ruth Levine wrote a Workbook for Policy Makers and they also estimated the Economic Value of Breastfeeding. In that book they said that most estimates didn't take into account the cost of bottles, teats, sterilization, etc., not to mention the mother's time costs for all of this preparation, cleaning, etc. Of course, the now famous Kaiser Permanente Study estimates at least a saving of over $1400 in costs to health providers for a modest reduction in illness. Turn it around an figure the co-pay for the health visits that a formula feeding parent would have to make as well as time spent, transportation costs, etc. The group that tried to estimate the cost effectiveness of bf promotion through hospitals came to the conclusion that bf promotion was one of the most cost-effective strategies around and they didn't even take costs of illness into account, or costs of formula preparation. They just calculated cost in relationship to the risk of mortality during the first year of life in the developing world. I suspect that any calculation that WIC will have made will be an incomplete calculation because they calculate the cost of what they provide as well as the cost of the food pack for the non-breastfeeding mother. This sounds like a wonderful thesis for someone doing health economics. Any takers?