In a new study, researchers found that the breastmilk of mothers who have recovered from COVID-19 contains strong antibodies to the virus.
Breast milk could help treat COVID-19 and protect babies.
The research was conducted by a team at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and elsewhere.
In the fight against the global pandemic, there is an urgent need to identify factors such as SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies in milk that may help confer immunity, particularly for vulnerable newborns.
Because human milk contains high levels of these secretory-type antibodies, breastfeeding by mothers who recover from COVID-19 could pass on immunity to babies, and there’s a chance the purified milk antibodies could be a therapy for adults suffering from COVID-19.
In the study, the team tested whether breast milk from mothers who recovered from COVID-19 would contain antibodies.
They found that all 15 mothers who recovered from COVID-19 had antibodies for COVID-19 in their breast milk.
This is good news because it opens the door to using breast milk from COVID-19-recovered mothers to treat critically ill babies or prevent severe illness in vulnerable infants.
The team also found high levels of a special type of antibody in milk called sIgA, which is especially good at fighting diseases that attack the lung lining such as COVID-19.
One thing that surprised them was that we found immune compounds that responded to COVID-19 even in the milk of mothers in the control group who were never infected with COVID-19.
This suggests that breast milk may have some general immune properties that help babies fight COVID-19, even if mothers have never been infected with the disease.
The researchers hope that they can use milk from COVID-19-recovered mothers to help treat infants from fighting COVID-19.
Research still needs to be done to see how effective human milk antibodies are as a treatment and to identify potential risks.
One scientist of the study is Health psychology professor Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook.
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