When Mommy's Sick

Motherhood – especially if it's your first time around – can be taxing. When you add a cold, flu or more serious illness to the equation, it can feel positively overwhelming. The good news is that it's always possible to breastfeed when sick, unless the mother is so ill that she is too weak or is in the hospital, says Angela Jacobi, RN, child nurse and certified lactation consultant.

Getting sick while nursing is an entirely different situation than for a bottle-feeding mother who is sick. If it's a cold or flu, the bottle-feeding mother can give her baby to someone else and go to bed. "The nursing mother will still need to empty her breasts, either by pump or Baby," Jacobi says. "She can't just 'bail out,' or she will run the risk of either becoming engorged or losing her milk. However, the literature on breastfeeding is very clear. The baby should still be breastfed or given expressed breast milk. Breast milk is a most robust food and is not easily contaminated or infected, even with mastitis."

While babies may get sick through contact, regardless of how they're being fed, catching it through breast milk shouldn't be a concern. Mary Koniz Arnold of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., was told as much by her doctor and lactation experts when she nursed her kids. She recalls being encouraged to continue nursing as the "antibodies that are fighting the sickness are passed on through the breast milk and are beneficial to the kid," she says.

"Any disruption in nursing can undermine the process – if the baby gets used to the bottle, [he or she] might eventually reject the mother's breast, and that would jeopardize all the continuing and future benefits of breastfeeding: optimum nutrition for the baby, passing benefits of the mother's immune system to the baby, and for the mother, natural child spacing and protection against breast cancer because of the suppression of estrogen and production of other hormones," Arnold says. 

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