Breastfeeding: Milk Matters! Seminar and Book Launch.

Maureen Minchin is a medical historian and pioneer lactation consultant who has been involved globally at the highest levels with infant feeding issues since the 1970s. Her books Food for Thought (1982-1992) and Breastfeeding Matters (1985-1998) have been influential world-wide. Her latest book is Milk Matters: infant feeding and immune disorder. This multi-disciplinary text argues that a milk hypothesis encompasses the hygiene hypothesis, and documents the many risks and harms of artificial feeding, while also providing practical strategies for parents struggling with the unhappy food-hypersensitive babies common in communities where formula feeding is entrenched.

Mary Renfrew is Professor of Mother and Infant Health in the University of York, where she is Director of the Mother and Infant Research Unit. A graduate of the Department of Nursing Studies in the University of Edinburgh, she then qualified as a midwife from the North Lothian School of Nursing and Midwifery. She gained her PhD in Edinburgh in 1982 while working with the Medical Research Council’s Reproductive Biology Unit. She has since worked in universities and hospitals in Oxford; Alberta, Canada; Leeds; and York. She established and led the national Midwifery Research Initiative at the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit in the University of Oxford, She founded the multidisciplinary Mother and Infant Research Unit (MIRU) in 1996; the research programme aims to improve the health and care of childbearing, women, their babies and families, with a particular focus on addressing inequalities in health. MIRU’s work has been used to inform policy and practice in infant feeding and maternity care nationally and internationally.