HIV and Breastfeeding

In the early 1980s it was discovered that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, could be passed through a mother’s milk to her baby.  Almost overnight in the industrialised countries, and later in the African countries most ravaged by HIV, breastfeeding became an endangered practice. But in the rush to reduce transmission of HIV, everything we already knew about breastfeeding’s life-saving effects was overlooked, with devastating consequences for mothers and babies.

In HIV and Breastfeeding – the untold story, former IBCLC Pamela Morrison, an acknowledged authority on HIV and breastfeeding, reveals how women in the world’s most poverty-stricken areas were persuaded to abandon breastfeeding as part of a short-sighted and deadly policy that led to an humanitarian disaster.

The dilemma that breastfeeding, an act of nurturing which confers food, comfort and love, could be at once life-saving yet lethal, has been called ‘the ultimate paradox’. This critical account reveals how vital breastfeeding is, even in the most difficult of circumstances, and examines the lessons that can be learned from the mistakes of the past – which is particularly relevant as we deal with the consequences for mothers and babies of another global pandemic, Covid-19.

With detailed information for HIV-positive mothers and their caregivers, and success stories from mothers themselves, this book is essential reading for anyone involved in protecting and supporting breastfeeding, or with a need for evidence-based information about breastfeeding and HIV.

KEY THEMES

- Explores the importance of breastfeeding to child survival and the political influences and events leading up to the decision by international policy-makers to provide HIV+ mothers living in poverty stricken countries with free formula as a means to avoid the risk of HIV-transmission through breastfeeding.
- Exposes the exaggeration of the risks of breastfeeding and minimising of the risks of formula feeding which underpinned the ill-thought-out human rights rationale of the new policy.
- Describes the elaborate training of infant feeding counsellors to implement the policy, and the difficulties that nurses and counsellors experienced in trying to introduce formula-feeding into cultures where breastfeeding was universally practised.
- Outlines the disastrous consequences for mothers and their babies, particularly the severe negative effects on infant ill-health, malnutrition and mortality of using breastmilk substitutes in conditions where breastfeeding was a cornerstone of child survival.