From Maureen Minchin
So lactoferrin can protect against endotoxin-induced shock in piglets
(In Brief, 25 April, p 23).
Great. Imagine my shock reading that Yoon Kim, the
researcher who discovered this, “hopes that formula containing lactoferrin might
be used to treat newborn infants who are at high risk of septic shock”.
In any up-to-date neonatal intensive care unit aware of the many hundreds of
bioactive components of milk, the serious and sometimes lethal consequences of
neonatal exposure to foreign antigens, and of the WHO’s recommendations about
infant feeding, such a formula is already in use. It’s called mothers’ milk.
Perhaps New Scientist needs to educate its readership as to the
extraordinary properties of this particular brand, which is regrettably not the
market leader in the US or Britain for reasons best understood in commercial,
not scientific, terms. Every year over a million children die for want of the
remarkable substance that is breast milk, and some of those deaths are in
high-tech American hospitals where bovine or vegetable-based formula is used,
with or without lactoferrin. It is a preventable annual holocaust, as one rabbi
said at a conference in Melbourne in 1993.
By the way, I understand that some experts are very cautious about adding
lactoferrin to formula, which companies have been experimenting with since the
early 1990s, as it might interfere with micronutrient absorption, for
example.
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The article should have read “formula containing higher levels of
lactoferrin than breast milk”—Ed
St Kilda, Victoria, Australia
