No.  As with most antibodies passed from the mother to the baby, they fade
soon after birth.

ar

That's a good question, and one I wasn't prepared to answer without
some research, but I believe now I finally understand it, though I'm
always ready to be corrected if need be.

This link gave me most of it:

http://www.bibl.liu.se/liupubl/disp/disp99/Med598s.htm

What it says is that carrying a baby is a huge immunological challenge
to the mother, because the baby is half made up of the father's genes.
If the mother's immune system had full access to the baby, with all
its male bit and blobs, it would think most of it a foreign object and
try to get rid of it.  In fact, some women lose their babies because
of a fault (if working too well is a fault) wherein their own
antibodies actually terminate the pregnancy.

To prevent that happening more often than it does, pregnant women are
equipped with something called a "fetomaternal barrier" which
separates the mother's and child's blood supplies, and other things.
However, certain antibodies, or maybe just the IGG antibodies, are
able to cross the barrier.  It is the IGG antibodies that are the main
virus fighting agents in our blood streams, though antibodies can
wander into or between cells, too (I think).  So that's how fetuses
are given a temporary supply of the mother's HSV IGG antibodies.

However, because of the fetomaternal barrier, and possibly because a
baby's immune system doesn't get going on its own until several months
after birth, what the baby doesn't have in its blood are the coded B
cells that know how to manufacture IGG antibodies.  The baby can't use
the mother's B cells because they would quickly target all the newly
foreign male antigens that the baby is half made up of.  Instead the
baby has to learn to distinguish its own foreign invaders on its own,
and then manufacture its own B cells from scratch, which in turn will
be there when a virus stumbles in years later.

After delivery, the IGG antibodies donated from the mother find they
have nothing to do and so fade from the system.  If HSV is encounted
later in life the body really has no record of having been associated
with it before, and so has to go through the Primary crap.

Hope that helps.  Interesting stuff, at least to me.

Of other interest, I read tonight, and remembered I'd heard it before,
just as the mother's antibodies confer a "passive immunity" on the
unborn or newborn child, it is possible to collect antibodies to some
diseases, say Hepatitus A, and inject them into a person who is
travelling to, say, a Hepatitus ravaged area of the world, and thereby
confer a sort of temporary immunity on the traveller.

That and a little more is here:

http://kidsdirect.net/BD/infants/vaccines/how.htm

Take care,

Mike

Once the baby is delivered ... the antibodies are no longer shared unless
the mother chooses to breastfeed for the next six months. :) By the way you
guys ~ I am 23 weeks pregnant! (For those that didn't know... You can find
more information on herpes and pregnancy on this web site:
http://members.cox.net/yoshi2me/Links/Links.htm .
~Angela