Breast Milk Antibodies Could Provide COVID-19 Cure

Misbar’s investigation found that antibodies in breast milk are still being studied as a potential treatment for coronavirus.

According to News Center Maine, researchers are actively collecting breast milk from across the country. 

In January 2021, Eyewitness News reported that the research is still in its early stages, but indications are that breast milk may contain antibodies that can help fight off severe cases of COVID-19.

The study is being conducted at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. Currently, participants are submitting one-ounce samples monthly. The study prefers women who have had a confirmed case of COVID-19.

Utrecht University stated on their official website that researchers hope to administer the milk in the form of ice cubes. When a patient licks such an ice cube, the antibodies will directly reach the relevant places in the mouth and nose, killing the virus particles.

However, the World Health Organization didn't mention anything related to the circulating claim online on their official website.

One of the study's researchers has expressed cautious optimism about the potential for breast milk to be used as a cure: "While there is good reason to be hopeful about breast milk as a coronavirus treatment for infants, we are many steps and funding dollars away from developing an effective therapy. But this could turn out to be really important for treating COVID-19 in the developing world, because people can easily get milk from recovered moms even if they don't have other treatments available. One real concern in using raw (unrefined) breast milk as a treatment is whether milk from recovered mothers might contain the active virus and actually worsen or cause infection. The science on this is being done and we should know soon how much of a transmission risk there is with breast milk. If the risk of infection is low, the good news is that it would not be that difficult to source milk from COVID-19-recovered donors through a strong, global recruitment campaign, especially given the ever-increasing number of infections worldwide. Because milk contains much higher levels of antibodies than plasma, we could also treat more infants with less milk than we could if we only rely on plasma donations. Using human milk antibodies as a treatment for adults is farther off because we still need to figure out how to refine the milk antibodies and we know much less about how well adults react to milk antibodies."

Further, it is still unclear if there could be active virus in breast milk. While it appears that there is not, "single-subject case reports from China and Germany documented the presence of virus in breast milk. All 3 of these studies detected viral RNA by polymerase chain reaction; no efforts were made to grow the virus in cell culture, making it impossible to know if infectious virus was present."

Since the study seems promising, but more research needs to be conducted, we rate this claim as suspicious. 

Additional reporting by Yasmine Sami and Tracy Davenport.