You say you don't want to play top trumps or start using baby death statistics to make a point, yet you'd still like my opinion? Why? So I can dig myself into a hole?
Contaminated baby milk is a horrible thing, just as contaminated baby food is.
Sure it would be lovely if, in an ideal world, everyone would bf and then wean onto natural products that don't come out of jars. But it's not and for those mothers who failed to bf, this evidence doesn't help them. Linking ff to cot death is really not on. Talk about hitting mothers where it hurts!
You could also say, as one midwife said to me when I had given birth to dd, that if I had given birth in the dark ages and failed to bf, my baby would die. I found that comment very upsetting and sick and it certainly didn't help me to carry on bfing. In fact a woman in the next bed overhead and then proceeded to encourage me to ff instead. But I did bf, both of mine.
However my original point was not to get into an argument of which is best - that is simply not the point and I've tried to say that time and time again. It was to pick up on something other posters said about the animal kingdom and developing countries having the right idea because they are closer to nature, less westernised, more culturally correct.
However their reason for bfing is largely because they don't have a choice. So in rural Ethopia, presumably if a woman cannot bf for whatever reason, that baby dies. They use it as contraception and also because it's a good source of nutrition in an area where nutritious food is hard to come by.
Let's not start making this thread anti-ff.