They Say: Breastmilk Fights Respiratory Viruses Better in Girls
Science gets particularly exciting when it turns up things no one was expecting. Researcher Fernando Polack, working in Buenos Aires investigating how much protection breastmilk provides for very-low-birthweight babies against the wicked metapneumovirus (no vaccine yet developed), was surprised to find stark gender differences in his results:
Girls who were not breastfed had a much higher risk of rehospitalization for respiratory illness than boys, but breastfed girls were almost never rehospitalized. In boys, the difference between breastfed and not was insignificant. (The researchers hasten to point out that there are plenty of other benefits of breastfeeding that still hold true for boys.)
The fascinating part of this is that a gender difference may point to breastmilk’s protective properties working differently than previously supposed. Maybe it’s not just delivering mom’s immunities until the kid gets its own
