Breastfeeding does not pose any additional risk of immunoprophylaxis failure on infants of HBV carrier mothers.

Whether babies born to hepatitis B (HB) carrier mothers with HB immunoprophylaxis at birth can be breastfed safely is controversial. A total of 230 such babies were followed up for one year to assess the influence of feeding method on the efficacy of HB immunoprophylaxis. The positive rates of anti-HBs at different ages are not statistically different between the breastfed group and the bottle-fed group. At 1 year, the rate was 80.9% in the breastfed group and 73.2% in the bottle-fed group in infants with HB vaccine alone, and 90.9% in the breastfed group and 90.3% in the bottle-fed group in infants with HBIG plus HB vaccine. There were no significant differences in the incidence of immunoprophylaxis failure between breastfed and bottle-fed babies. The results indicated that breastfeeding does not have a negative influence on the response of anti-HBs and on the failure rates of immunoprophylaxis in the infants born to HB carrier mothers.