Letters to the Editor

We wish to thank the writers for taking the time to reanalyze our report and point out that our data merely justify the statement that bottle-feeding increases the risk of hospitalization only among private patients. We hope that we will ultimately be able to have a sufficiently large population of clinic patients who are breast-fed in order to determine whether breast-feeding can be shown statistically to confer protection in this group as well.

We can assure Dr Margolis that a selection bias was not operative.