"But isn't it in their interests for the milk to do the job it's supposed to do. If it was found to be detrimental to babies health then wouldn't that hit their profits as people would stop buying it"
Yes - if parents were able to a) recognise and b) make a connection between their child's suboptimal health and development and how they were fed as infants, but they don't. They never do. That's true of ff, as well as of mums who smoke in pregnancy, who are never able to see the impact of prenatal nicotine exposure on their babies (or at least that's true of all the women I know who smoked while pregnant), and of women who feed their older children on bloody appalling diets. Most people I know swear their kids are fantastically healthy, but then you find out in passing at the school gates about their long term problems with constipation, their ear infections, their chest infections....... But their mums think it's all completely normal. Babies get sick. They vomit. They get upset tummies. They get constipation. Children get lots of ear infections. They wouldn't in a million years make the connection between these minor illnesses and how their babies are fed, and even if they did, they've always got some story about how their neighbor's bf child is even sicker (of course - they have no idea and don't think it's relevant how MUCH breastfeeding a supposedly breastfed child has had, or whether it's been exclusive bf or not, or when that neighbor had introduced solids, or any number of other relevant facts).
I was thinking about this the other day, while watching a lovely baby at a kids party I went to. I was chatting to the mum about her work. She told me she'd gone back to work when the baby was only a few weeks old - he'd been bottlefed almost from birth. At one point this baby tipped back his head and laughed. When he did this you could see inside his mouth - that his palate was incredibly high and narrow... something that's very typical of ff babies. Babies who are bf have much shallower and wider palates, hence less dental occlusion. I felt quite sad when I saw this and I was thinking - it would never occur to her or any other mother I know to think of something like this - it's simply not something people know about until they've done the research.