bottle feeding - is she right?

[bamboozleslover]

hi there,
i was talking to a friend of mine who bottle feeds her ds and she said it is okay to leave opened ready to drink formula in the fridge for 48 hours and any prepared formula or opened ready to drink milk can be left at room for temp for 3 hours. i thought it was only an hour but apparently that is only for where the baby has started the milk cos it has been contaminated by the babies mouth. is she right cos i would hate her ds to get ill cos if this? she also gives her ds water from the tap - she says it is okay as long as you run it for 30 seconds. when i asked her where she got this info from she said MN, so it probably is right as people on here usually are but just wanted to make sure.

Too much water can overload a young baby's kidneys.

In reply to Muffinmum's post, and indirectly to VKone:

[science hat on]

Giardia is not endemic in the UK and is not found in UK tap water.
There are only a couple of thousand cases in this country every year, the vast majority being associated with foreign travel to areas where Giardia is endemic.

The reason people are advised not to wash contact lenses in tap water is because of a completely different organism called Acanthamoeba. These do not cause any sort of gut disease at all but can, rarely, cause keratitis if you happen to stick one directly in your eye.

[science hat off]

lol - mrsbadger, do you think that it would be worth getting a water filter then???

Colditz - so how much water is too much water then as I don't think that anyone here would knowingly want to overload their baby's kidneys??

Once a baby is 6 months you can use tap water as a drink but should still use cooled boiled water to make up formula bottles.

Bf babies don't need any water if they are exclusively bf as they get all they need via the breast - may just feed/drink more when it is hot.

Formula babies may need extra when it is really hot but don't really otherwise.

It is quite normal for a baby to have scant bowl movements - even bf ones, so just not going for a few days isn't necessarily constipation - just the normal habits of that particular baby.

If a baby is exc bf or ff, then giving additional water may effect the lo's feeding as they are full of water and therefore may not want some or all of a feed - which isn't a good thing IMO.

Filtering does not do the same job as boiling. If you want sterile, guaranteed clean, water, boil it.
If you want better-tasting water, filter it.

Boiling is held to be uneccesary after 6mo though, so I wouldn't bother with either after that. Actually I wouldn't bother with filtering at all - waste of time & money, and the filtering removes chlorine (major bacteria-killer) from the water so once filtered one should keep it in the fridge.

I'm still wondering why you need to boil water for a younger baby to drink - yes, run it from the tap for a while to ensure any bugs collected at the tap end are not in the water, but after that, surely the water is clean?

It's not a good idea to give young (solely breastfed or bottle fed) babies a lot of water to drink and breastfed babies really don't need any. But a formula fed baby may need a small amount in hot weather, and some formula fed babies do get constipated, and small amounts of water seem to help.

thankyou mrs.badger i stand corrected but giardia is v.common cause of D and V in dogs but perhaps that is drinking from ponds/rivers etc?

i used to boil and cool dds water, until she was about 3 weeks, then i kept forgetting and it wouldnt be cool when she wanted it etc. so i gave up and just used tap. she never had D+V or any other nasty horrible things.

dont see the problem with adults drinking tap water either, better than grabbing a bottle of coke!

wots D&V?

D&V = diarrhoea and vomitting

oops seems so obvious now!

in relation to this i was told if you do boil your water for bottles then you do not need to wait for it to cool and you can also put the hot bottles straight in the fridge as long as the temp does not rise above 5 degrees C. if you prefer to make your feeds up fresh you can keep a container of boiled water in the fridge ready for each feed.

another tip i was told was that if you need a bottle straight away either to use water straight from the tap or half water from the tap and half just boiled water.