Women with enterovirus symptoms, such as fever, respiratory issues or diarrhea, should not breastfeed babies younger than 3 months, to keep the virus from spreading, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said in a statement yesterday.
The CDC said it made the recommendation based on the conclusions made during its meetings on Wednesday and Thursday.
Breastfeeding can resume once the mother recovers, it said.
Photo: Lin Hui-chin, Taipei Times
Current guidelines do not warn against virus transmission via breast milk from infected mothers, and simply suggest that mothers who might have the infection avoid direct contact with their babies and have healthy family members feed the breast milk to infants through bottles, the CDC said.
Guidelines for caring for newborns — babies younger than 1 month — would be updated to better protect them from enterovirus infections, it said.
As of yesterday, Taiwan had reported seven severe enterovirus cases this year, the CDC said, adding that there were five deaths, four of which involved newborn infants.
All severe cases involving newborns were caused by the echovirus 11, the first such diagnosis in Taiwan since 2018.
However, the genetic sequence of this year’s echovirus 11 cases differed from those in 2018, the CDC said.
The current strains are genetically similar to those that were found in Europe in 2022 and 2023, and in Japan last year, suggesting that the ongoing outbreak might have originated from those regions, it added.
Taiwan Society of Neonatology president Yang San-nan (楊生湳) on Wednesday said that echovirus 11 infections tend to progress rapidly, attacking the liver, heart and kidneys, then the brain, which could lead to septic shock within a day.
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