Breastfeeding Zealots Promote HIV Infected Feeding

Timothy Birdnow

In The Coming Breastfeeding Wars I argue that the Left is gearing up to make breastfeeding the next civil rights struggle, and that the advocates of extended breastfeeding are a bit on the moonpie side.

Well, I am not wrong - especially about the moonpies.
http://mothering.com/breastfeeding/aids-war-breastfeeding

Yes, if you bothered to visit the website you did indeed see an argument that mothers infected with HIV should still breastfeed their children!

From the article:

"There was no evidence that the 15% of children breastfed by HIV-positive mothers who themselves become positive are actually infected with HIV let alone that all, or even most, will develop AIDS. There was also no attempt to factor out how many health risks in these children were due to many of the mothers being IV drug users or malnourished. There should have been concerns about the use of unpublished data and the most extreme data coming from a study of a type that the authors themselves declared should not be used. The extensive problems with this analysis are discussed in detail in an AnotherLook position paper (Crowe, 2006).

But the profitable formula train had left the station and facts and experience were not going to derail it. Drug and formula companies brought women simplified messages, like this from a GlaxoSmithKline-run website in 2004, “If you are HIV positive, do not breast-feed, because it's dangerous for your baby. Your baby can get HIV infection or reinfection from breast milk. Bottle feeding with infant formula will help protect your baby's health.” (TreatHIV.com, 2004) Governments insulted the intelligence of women with capitalized (and unsubstantiated) orders like, “HIV-positive women SHOULD NOT BREASTFEED” (Alberta Health, 1998)."

[...]

"t is depressing to think how much better off the world would have been, how many babies would be alive and how many mothers would have been spared the agony of watching their baby die in front of them, if only all those PhDs, MDs, RNs and other educated people who have swallowed the HIV=AIDS theory for all these years, had simply done nothing, if the world had paid them to stay at home rather than coming to work and promoting and managing the deadly formula feeding programs of the past decade."

End excerpts.

Now, only a pathological zealot would advocate breastfeeding for a woman with a disease that is transmitted through bodily fluids, yet there you have it. This whole breastfeeding thing is far beyond rationality. Notice the author of this piece claims bottle feeding is killing babies, and that it is better for a very sick woman to breastfeed than for a child to consume formula. This is the argument of a lunatic.

I ask all readers; is my assessment of the coming breastfeeding wars somehow over the top?  The reality is that many advocates of the practice are so enthralled with this "back to nature" ideal that they can no longer think rationally.

This is what is about to be unleashed on America.