THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, April 25, 1995 TAG: 9504250269
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
Breast milk has long been known as the best food for infants. Now researchers have found another benefit: It protects against one of the most common childhood illnesses.
Researchers at the Center for Pediatric Research in Norfolk have discovered that breast milk protects children against ``rotavirus diarrhea,'' an illness that affects nine out of 10 American children by age 3, resulting in more than 200,000 hospitalizations a year.
Rotavirus diarrhea is particularly dangerous for young children, lead researcher Dr. David O. Matson said, because they can quickly become dehydrated from vomiting and diarrhea.
Matson's study, conducted on 200 mother-infant pairs in Mexico City, monitored the children from birth until age 2. It showed that most diarrhea infections did not develop until the mothers finished breast-feeding.
The study provides one more reason to encourage mothers to breast-feed, Matson said. About half of all new mothers in this country breast-feed their newborns, but fewer than 20 percent continue to breast-feed until their babies are 6 months old.
``Not only does milk have the nutritional factors that children need to thrive,'' he said, ``but it has factors that counteract the common infections that children are exposed to. And that's not true just for rotavirus, but for other bacterial agents of the gut, herpes simplex (which causes fever blisters) and ear infections.''
Basically, he said, breast milk protects babies from their fuzzy heads to their smooth bottoms.
Lorij Schmick, a Chesapeake mother of three, knows that.
Her 3-year-old son just had his first bout with the rotavirus diarrhea - less than a year after she stopped nursing him. Her 20-month-old son, who is only partially breast-fed, caught his brother's virus, but had a milder case. And her 3-month-old daughter, who is exclusively breast-fed, did not catch the virus.
Matson said his study could have important implications even for mothers who do not breast-feed. Researchers will work to identify the factor in breast milk that contributes to disease protection, and they will try to synthesize it so it can be added to formula.
``It's a reality that children are not going to breast-feed during the entire time that they're taking in milk,'' he said. ``So when they don't breast-feed, it would be nicer to have better artificial milks than we have now.''
Matson will present his study's results next month in San Diego at a meeting of the American Pediatric Society and the Society for Pediatric Research. The Center for Pediatric Research is a joint venture of Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters and Eastern Virginia Medical School.
The research was funded with a $3 million grant from the National Institute for Child Health and Development, part of the federal National Institutes of Health.
Last week, the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases announced the development of a vaccine designed to prevent rotavirus diarrhea.
The vaccine, still in the clinical testing stage, protected against 57 percent of all cases of rotaviral diarrhea, according to a study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Matson said the vaccine, which would be given to children at ages 2, 4 and 6 months, would not prevent the severe and potentially debilitating bouts of diarrhea that can occur before the vaccine kicks in.
``Breast-feeding is a way of providing pretty strong protection to children while they're being immunized.
``The two dovetail . . . quite well.'' ILLUSTRATION: Lorij Schmick of Chesapeake, mother of three, says nursing
protected her daughter Gretchen.
KEYWORDS: STUDY BREAST FEEDING by CNB