Breast Milk and PFASs - Part 6

In their paper "Breastfeeding as an Exposure Pathway for Perfluorinated Alkylates," the authors tell us that:

exposure via human milk could therefore lead to elevated serum concentrations in breastfed infants.

 This, they tell us, is a concern because:

Adverse effects of PFASs reported in children with similar serum-PFAS concentrations include immunotoxicity, as revealed by decreased antibody concentrations toward childhood vaccines and increased frequency of common infections.

I believe I showed in my previous post that there is nothing to support the "increased frequency of common infections."  This leaves us with the "decreased antibody concentrations toward childhood vaccines" concern.

The authors cite the paper called "Serum Vaccine Antibody Concentrations in Children Exposed to Perfluorinated Compounds"  In my last post I looked at this data, and ended the post with this:

Let's ignore that.  Let's assume that their negative numbers shown in Table 3 actually show that exposure results in a decrease of antibody concentration.  Let's forget about the values the model calculated with a 2-fold exposure, and just look at what they found.

Time out!

I write these posts in real time.  I start with a question and I try to answer it.  I am not sure if my thinking at the beginning will be changed at the end.  I am not sure what rabbit holes I will go down as I try to support my position.

This series of posts has been a challenge towards the end.  In my last post I looked at the data from the paper they cited to support the concern that:

...exposure via human milk could therefore lead to elevated serum concentrations in breastfed infants.

I am trying to support my position that breastfeeding in the first six months - based on WHOs recommendations - has better health outcomes for the baby then forgoing breastfeeding because "Breastfeeding can expose babies to toxic chemicals" as the news articles so quickly reported based on their paper's claim.

So it comes down to this:

Should a woman forgo breastfeeding based on this paper's contention that "exposure via human milk could therefore lead to elevated serum concentrations in breastfed infants?"

1. If that statement is true, it is true for one particular group of chemicals; PFASs.

and....

2. If there is elevated serum concentrations of PFASs in the baby who was breastfed, will those elevated levels of PFASs cause a negative health outcome?

and...

3. If those PFASs now in the baby will cause a negative health outcome for the baby, is that negative health outcome greater than the benefits of breastfeeding?

I am trying to understand what their data shows.  I am having a very difficult time understanding it.

Question 2 is the key to this.  Their paper claims that breastfeeding "could therefore lead to elevated serum concentrations."  This claim needs to be supported by data, and, if true, the elevated serum concentrations of PFASs must present a negative health outcome.

So here is where I am having trouble with this.  I need to know if PFASs are transmitted in breast milk, and if they are, is the baby impacted in a negative way greater than a baby who was not breastfed?

Which brings me to this point.  Their data does not make sense to me.  This is a a peer reviewed paper and has a "Harvard" affiliation.  All of this is making me question myself.  I must not be seeing this correctly.

I have read, reread, and re-reread, and re-re-reread these papers many times.  The more I read them the more convinced I am that I must be missing something or am too much a novice to understand them.

Surely they could not have left this information out intentionally or accidentally.  The peer review would have caught it.  Its not there, things are missing, graphs are not explained....am I really seeing what I think I am seeing or am I missing it because I am below some level of understanding needed to review this paper?

Then I remember that its not me that has to support their findings, its them.  Did they?

Next post: Part 7