Hi, I just thought I'd pass on something in my experience that might be useful to someone out there. You see, when my first child was tiny (and exclusively breastfed btw) we had a spate of ear infections with her. I knew that breastfeeding was not a 100% guarantee, but you can imagine, I was somewhat miffed that it didn't seem to be helping at all :-( Then the doctor told us it was eczema in her ears, which was getting infected. Again, I was miffed because, after all, isn't breastfeeding supposed to help against eczema? But at least it kind of explained why my child was getting ear infections. Recently, Emma has been diagnosed properly (as has the rest of my family). She (and the rest of us) has psoriosis, *not* eczema and judging from the family distribution, it's genetic :-( Psoriosis isn't like eczema in that it is not an allergic condition as such - it's probably genetic, but it's a problem with the proper sheading of dead skin cells (the confusion in our family was caused by the fact that we *also* have a lot of allergies). The skin cells in psoriosis build up and causing scaley plaques of dead skin that can irritate the young, healthy skin, causing itching, which leads to scratching and infection. I am sure breastfeeding helps, but maybe not in quite the direct way we believe it helps with eczema. Emma's ears (and ear canals) are quite badly affected by psoriosis and that is why she got lots of ear infections. Bingo! It turns out that the Psoriosis Association in Britain believe that such "ear psoriosis" is probably extremely common (a variant on scalp psoriosis) and are trying to organise research into it. Now I am wondering about other breastfed babies that get more than their fair share of ear infections - is psoriosis possibly a factor? -- Anna (Mummy to Emma, born 17th Jan 1995, Alice, born 11th Sept 1996, ??? due 18th April 1998) Email: [log in to unmask] Web Page: http://www.ratbag.demon.co.uk/anna