COVID-infected mums’ breast milk safe for babies

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-01-19 12:00

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A small study of 110 lactating women has provided early evidence that breast milk is an unlikely source of COVID-19 infection for infants. Results showed that while six per cent of lactating women with a proven or suspected case of COVID-19 had RNA from the virus in their breast milk, none of their samples contained infectious genetic material. There was no evidence of infection in the babies who were breastfed by the 7 mothers who had SARS-CoV-2 RNA in their milk.

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Media Release Springer Nature, Web page

Journal/
conference: Pediatrics Journal

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of California, Los Angeles

Funder: P.K. received support from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) AIDS Institute, UCLA CFAR (AI028697), the James B. Pendleton Charitable Trust, and the McCarthy Family Foundation. C.D.C. received an award for this study from the University of California Office of the President Emergency COVID-19 Research Program, and also received resources for the Human Milk Research Biorepository from the Altman Clinical Translational Research Institute (ACTRI) at UC San Diego funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) under Award Number UL1TR001442. L.B. is the UC San Diego Chair of Collaborative Human Milk Research, endowed by the Family LarssonRosenquist Foundation that also provided an unrestricted COVID-19 emergency gift fund. G.M.A. is supported by the IMPAACT Network. Overall support for the International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials Group (IMPAACT) was provided by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under Award Numbers UM1AI068632 (IMPAACT LOC), UM1AI068616 (IMPAACT SDMC) and UM1AI106716 (IMPAACT LC), with cofunding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

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