BREAST milk from mothers infected with HIV can help protect their infants from infection.
In the West, women with HIVare advised not to breastfeed. But this is not the case in sub-Saharan Africa. Unexpectedly, about 85 per cent of babies escape the disease. Steffanie Sabbaj of the University of Alabama and colleagues in the US and Zambia discovered immune cells in the mothers’ milk that recognise and bind to HIV proteins. These T cells also target and kill infected cells (Journal of Virology, vol 76, p 7365).
