Should I tell my friend she's making up formula wrong?

[thenameiwantedwastaken]

Hi there. I'm exclusively bf my DD. Noticed one of my friends who formula feeds making up a bottle for her lo when we were out the other day. She added the powder to a bottle of cold water (boiled and cooled, I guess). From what I've read on here I think that's not what current guidelines say and that the safest thing to do is make up the feed with freshly boiled water, so as to kill any germs in the powder?

I didn't say anything at the time as I don't like to tell other mums what to do, have never made a ff myself and guess she is an intelligent woman who has read the instructions on the packet.

But now I keep thinking of her dc getting ill.

How can I broach it?

If formula is that dangerous why is it available at all??

Because it isn't dangerous if you follow the guidelines.

Same as raw old meat isn't dangerous if you cook it!

My 2 are still alive.... cooled boiled water for the first and tap water for the second.

First one is always ill - ( followed around with the antibacterial wipes) and DS is in rude health. A bit of dirt at a young age seems to have toughened him up.

Precisely, Moonlight!

The guidance is there so parents can make up the milk powder safely and cleanly - the bugs are mostly destroyed if done this way

its not heating it up though mckenzie - the Op's friend is adding powder to cooled boiled water and using as is

Oh well.

Anifrangapani's study (where n = 2) is obviously going to trump anything the European Committee on Science and Nutrition can come out with, despite their many studies

You can't have meant your post that way, can you, Anifrangapani?

I am glad your kids are still alive

It is true...

And you are right n=2 is a lousey sample.

Point I was trying to make is that if her friend's kid is not yet ill from having the milk made up with cooled water than it is probably going to be ok

Understood alla so the bugs haven't been express-bred, but they are still there in an unknown quantity! They need to be zapped!

To answer yr question, I don't think you can tell her without being seen as interfering, esp as you are excl bfing (as am I). If you were ff it may be poss but still tricky.

Ani, you're prob right, though she has not said how old the baby is...if this is a young baby, he/she is more at risk.

I hadn't been ill until I was, Anifrangapani... Nobody is, I don't think.

True - mine were bf til 6 months then on tap water. As DS had a thing for eating slugs ( I kid you not) at the time I figured a few more bugs weren't going to harm him.

I bf and ff

when mine had ff it was almost always cooled boiled water - as I deliberately got them used to cooled water (warming baby milk is a faff)

Depends how good your friendship is.

My friend has a DD who is now 5 months, a few days younger than DD3, and her last baby was 7 years ago. I saw her mixing formula, and just said "Do you know they've changed the guidelines now? You need to do x, y, z instead. Bacteria. Research. Blah blah..."

Her response was positive. No idea if she changed her method, but she now has the choice, whereas she didn't before.

My friend does this as well. One day her baby got diarrhoea, it could have been a bug, it could have been from drinking incorrectly prepared milk. We will never know and as he recovered perfectly fine, we never need to.

However I was concerned that she perhaps did not know why the guidelines were as they are, so I just gave her that information without telling her what to do. I have no idea how she makes up bottles now and it's none of my business but at least she is better informed.

tap water

what's wrong with tap water?

She may well know. I always did it that way when out and about because taking out a made up bottle and keeping it cool for a day wasn't possible anyway. And if you make it up warm then try to cool it then it stays warm longer than it should do anyway.

Round here you have a high chance of these lovelies turning up in tap water, or worse... i don't even let my older kids drink it and i'm the type who's never steralised anything for any of my three.

There is a WHO leaflet (is a pdf btw) from 2007 that says you can use room temperature water. (p.s. I made ds's feeds up with room temperature water and he survived too!)

The safest way to prepare a feed is using water that has been boiled and cooled to no less than 70ºC.

? If you do not have access to boiling water, you may wish to use sterile liquid infant formula.

? Alternatively, you can prepare feeds using fresh, safe water at room temperature and consume immediately.

? Feeds prepared with water cooler than 70ºC should not be stored for use later.

? Throw away any left-over feed after two hours.

I made up both dds this way and they are both fine,did'nt realise this was wrong to be honest
How are you supposed to make it up when you are out though? Carry a kettle round with you?

My brother was fed evaporated milk when he was a baby, never did him any harm (almost 40yrs ago mind you)

Evap. milk would not be considered nutritionally adequate these days, but the bacterial risk of powdered formula would not have been there - evaporated milk was canned, not dried. So it's not surprising your brother was not harmed.

Isn't the issue here the level of risk posed by not using near-boiling water to make up the feeds? I haven't seen any figures on this (and I have to confess that, as the dses are 12, 14 and 16, I haven't seen the need to do the research), but the risk should be quantifiable - what percentage of healthy babies, fed on formula made up with cooled boiled water, will get this particular bacterial infection - is it 50% or 10% or 1% or 0.001%?

If we know the level of risk, we can make an educated decision. If I have understood correctly, no babies whose health was not already compromised, have died of this particular bacterium, which suggests that the risk of death for a normal healthy baby of milk made up this way, is likely to be very low indeed. However, I don't know if there are any figures to indicate how many healthy babies have become ill with this bacteria due to improperly prepared milk, so that risk is a lot harder to assess.

My personal experience would tend to suggest that the risk of a baby becoming ill as a result of milk being made this way, is very low - and I realise that three babies is not a big statistical sample, but it is three babies, fully formula fed from 3 months, on 6 feeds a day initially - which is a lot of individual bottles, all made the same way, and not one gastric infection. And I used to make up a whole day's feeds at once, and store them in the fridge.

IMHO these guidelines are only there to stop people bottle feeding and bump up the dodgy government stats that say that we should all be breastfeeding. this whole debate makes me so cross, if this advice about bacteria is true then the population would have been wiped out 40 years ago as that is how all our mothers prepared formula milk. (in fact my mother prepared bottle feeds with the milk added and kept them in the fridge - and in fact that is how the mighty Gina Ford tells us to do it!!).

OP i would not say anything to your friend, if any of my breastfeeding friends said that to me then i would feel quite patronised TBH, speaking as a bottlefeeding mother we are bombarded with this government advice and i am sure your friend is more than aware of it. it is just practically impossible and anyone who says we should be carrying a kettle around with us is obviously either (a) not a mother or (b) breastfeeding