Can I breastfeed with a cold or flu?

The verdict

Keep feeding. A cold, the flu and the ordinary run of winter respiratory viruses are not transmitted through breast milk, and every major breastfeeding authority says the same thing: continue.

La Leche League GB puts the timing plainly. There is no need to separate from your baby, because he will already have been exposed to the illness before you realised you were ill. Respiratory viruses shed before symptoms appear. By the point you feel rough enough to search for this page, the exposure has happened. Stopping feeds at that moment removes the protection without removing the risk.

What your milk does instead is respond. Your immune system is already producing antibodies to the specific virus you are fighting, and those antibodies pass into your milk. The American Academy of Pediatrics describes breast milk as carrying antibodies and other immune factors that help protect a baby against infection. This is not a general wellness claim. It is targeted, made-to-order protection against the thing currently in your house.

Why stopping is the worse option

Weaning abruptly in the middle of an illness stacks three problems on top of each other. Your baby loses the antibodies. You risk engorgement, blocked ducts and mastitis at exactly the point you have least energy to deal with them. And your supply drops when you are least able to rebuild it.

La Leche League GB addresses the fear that illness reduces milk: you will continue to make milk for your baby, though if you feel very ill it may seem as though you are producing less milk. Continuing to breastfeed whenever your baby is interested will help maintain milk production while you are ill and increase it afterwards if needed. Feeling touched out and depleted is not the same as running dry.

If your baby does catch it, feeding usually gets easier rather than harder to justify. A blocked nose can make latching frustrating for a small baby, and feeds may be shorter and more frequent for a few days, but breast milk stays the most easily tolerated thing they can take.

What actually helps

Fluids first. La Leche League GB advises that even if you cannot eat, try to keep up your fluid intake to prevent dehydration. Milk production is water-hungry and a fever plus poor appetite is a fast route to feeling far worse than the virus alone would make you feel.

Then hygiene, which is where the real transmission risk sits. Sensible hygiene precautions such as using tissues and binning them immediately, and washing hands with soap and water or using hand cleansers can help reduce transmission of illness. Turning your head away from the baby to cough, and keeping your hands clean before a feed, does more than any change to feeding would.

Then rest, in the only form available. Feeding lying down, on a bed prepared to be safe, is usually less exhausting than sitting up through every feed. If there is any chance you might fall asleep, the preparation matters, and our page on feeding lying down covers what the Lullaby Trust and Unicef UK say about that.

Remedies: check, do not guess

This page does not carry medicine information, and we publish no doses for anything. What we will say is that "it is only a cold remedy" is not a safety assessment. Combination products for colds and flu often contain several active ingredients, and the answer is different for each one.

The service to use in the UK is the Breastfeeding Network's Drugs in Breastmilk service, which answers questions from parents directly. In the US and internationally, LactMed, the National Library of Medicine's drugs and lactation database, is free and searchable. In Australia, the Australian Breastfeeding Association points parents to the same kind of specialist medicines information. A pharmacist who can look at the specific product in front of you is worth more than a general reassurance.

When it is not just a cold

Two things are worth separating out. The first is flu proper, which the NHS describes as coming on much more quickly than a cold, with a sudden high temperature, aching body and exhaustion, rather than the gradual sore throat and runny nose of a cold. Flu is worth taking seriously in the early postnatal period, when you are already short of sleep and recovering.

The second is that a fever with breast pain is not a cold. A red, hot, painful, wedge-shaped area of breast with flu-like symptoms is mastitis until proven otherwise, and it has its own page and its own urgency.

Signs that need help the same day

The NHS sepsis guidance is worth knowing while you are unwell. Get urgent help for confusion or slurred speech, blue, grey, pale or blotchy skin, lips or tongue, a rash that does not fade when a glass is rolled over it, difficulty breathing, or not passing urine all day. Breathlessness that is new or worsening also needs assessment rather than another night of waiting.

Where guidance differs

On this question it does not, which is unusual and worth stating.

The UK position, through the NHS and La Leche League GB, is that ordinary maternal illness is not a reason to stop and that hygiene rather than separation is the tool.

The US position through the American Academy of Pediatrics is that few infections prevent breastfeeding, and that where illness genuinely does interrupt direct feeding, expressing keeps supply going until it can resume.

Ireland, through the HSE, and Australia, through the Australian Breastfeeding Association, give the same advice.

The one situation everyone treats differently is being too ill to feed at all, rather than ill and coping. If you are hospitalised or cannot safely hold your baby, the aim shifts to protecting supply by expressing until you are well, not to weaning. Ask for infant feeding support on the ward rather than assuming feeding has ended.