Washington: Breast milk provides immunity to babies against viral illnesses, even when the mother is not sick herself, say Australian researchers.

According to doctoral thesis by Dani-Louise Bryan of the Paediatrics and Child Health Department of Flinders University in Adelaide, if mothers are exposed to pathogens infecting their child, the breast milk produces antibodies, regardless of whether they themselves display any symptoms of the disease.

The research was concentrated on a common virus in childhood, RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), which could develop into a very severe bronchiolitis requiring hospitalisation.

The researchers targeted the mothers of hospitalised infants, requesting breast milk from them. They then compared it to the milk of healthy mothers in the general community, looking at a number of different factors in their milk. All the babies in the study were exclusively breastfed.

It was observed that in the breast milk of mothers with sick babies, there was a four-to-five-fold increase in the total number of white blood cells, which helped protect against viral and bacterial infections, compared to the healthy control mothers. It was noticed that the milk was changing to help the baby.

Though there is little doubt that breastfed babies suffer fewer illnesses, more work needs to be done to understand what the immune cells are doing in the infant once they have been passed through the milk.

ANI