by Ann in the U.K., Unknown News
May 16, 2007
Well, it's National Breastfeeding Awareness Week in the UK, the annual charade were the British government -- via its health care agent, the National Health Service -- pretends
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to give a crap about the health of our nation. I understand similar events occur elsewhere on our planet -- perhaps even in the equally hypocritical U.S.
This heartbreaking article from The Guardian (see sidebar  for excerpt) pretty much summarizes why I'm involved in all this in the first place.
Sadly -- although you wouldn't know it because this is Unknown News of gargantuan, historic proportions -- this is a story repeated across the globe.
My close friend is a Pediatric Sister and it took me, a layman by comparison, to point out that fact to her before she realized it was true, even in the local facility where she's worked for over a decade: breastfed kids are rarely hospitalized with diarrhea -- or any other 'common' condition for that matter -- but, even without the dirty water, formula-fed kids are hospitalized frequently.
Who knows how many of them don't survive ... Some figures suggest it's 1.5 million a year. If correct, that's one kid actually dying every 20 seconds of every day just because of 'unsafe feeding'. Only the naïve would assume that the World Health Organization statistic and their rather quaint way of referring to 'formula feeding' only refers to infants being fed unlikely foodstuffs, in unsanitary conditions, somewhere in the undeveloped world. It doesn't. It's a global figure. And, on the whole, it refers to infants who are being formula fed across the planet.
So why would mothers put their children at risk like that? Go on, guess.
Education. Or lack of it. And I don't mean in Bangladesh, or in other regions of the world considered 'undeveloped' either. I mean right here, in the 'civilized' west. Our mothers are just as ignorant about the effects of formula on their children -- or the effects of not breastfeeding on their children and themselves -- as mothers in the Third World. I'm not joking. Ask them. Ask any mother you know whether breastmilk and formula are virtually the same substance. Ask whether, thanks to modern technologies and advancements, formula is 'close' to breastmilk. Ask whether
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Eti Khuman's face lies cradled on her mother's shoulder, her cheek resting in against Mina's collarbone. Eti is
beautiful, but she is poorly: her breathing is heavy, and Mina has the distracted look of a mother who is very worried indeed. Eti's illness -- first vomiting, then diarrhea -- struck without warning. Like all mothers in Bangladesh, Mina knew to fear diarrhea: in this country, diarrhea can kill. So she wasted no time in bringing her eight-week-old daughter here, to the main diarrhea hospital near her home in the capital, Dhaka.
Eti was admitted, and now she and Mina are in the main ward, a sweltering room so packed with beds that there is barely space to walk between them. It's a general ward, but most of the patients are babies. Some, like Eti, are being held by their mothers: others lie quietly on their beds attached to drips. Not one is crying: they are all much too weak for that. Twenty-five years ago, when Dr Iqbal Kabir first came to work at this hospital, small babies were almost unknown as patients. Today, he says, infants make up as many as 70% of admissions.
The reason? Kabir shakes his head, and points to a poster on the wall above Eti's bed. The same poster is displayed, many times, around the ward. It shows a baby's bottle, with a big cross drawn heavily through it. The message is clear. "Bottle-feeding is harmful," says Kabir. "Because bottle-fed babies get diarrhea, since their formula is mixed with dirty water and since their bottles are not sterile. Do you know how many breastfed babies are admitted here with diarrhea? The number is almost zero." |
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formula does the same job as breastmilk -- whether, for example, it protects mothers and their children against a variety of often life threatening and/or debilitating conditions. I'll bet you a fortune neither of us have, the majority of mothers even in Western nations say 'yes' to each question when the answer, of course, is no.
The fact is: Poor, Western women have been just as hoodwinked by the formula scandal as poor women on the rest of the planet. That's why (contrary to their own tradition) so few of them breastfeed; why there is a backlash against breastfeeding 'nazis' like me and; why formula company profits are increasing as long-term breastfeeding rates decline. Why else would the formula companies use white, Western kids as the 'poster children' for their marketing activities in regions where
Western standards are seen as the ideal? Because most Western women bottle-feed too, eventually.
So whose fault is it that these poor Bangladeshi children -- and others across the globe -- are suffering?
It's the fault of the (largely Western, largely U.S.-based) formula companies who, after all, have to earn a profit, so what's wrong
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with a little creative marketing -- everyone knows advertising is a lie anyway, right?
It's the fault of the medical profession, who are simply doing what their industry buddies suggest -- and are far too often paying them for -- when they fail to give women accurate information and, instead, pressure these ill-informed women into doing something they (and a century and a half of their predecessors) feel incapable of doing, knowing full well that sooner or later they'll resort to the 'alternatives'?
It's the fault of the media -- who, apart from the odd article on occasions such as this, do little to rectify (and do much more to exacerbate) the situation (think of all those stick women in the media; the furor over Janet Jackson's nipple; the focus on the fake/pert/youthful; the severe lack of accurate/informative articles or programs on the subject of infant feeding...).
It's the fault of our successive governments (on both sides of the pond, and elsewhere) who've failed to inform successive generations of women about the risks of formula feeding and the benefits of breastfeeding, and who have consistently failed to right media wrongs (simply by educating young women about their own physiology), or to reign in the unethical activities of the medical profession and, the multimillion dollar formula industry -- all of whom they're intricately enmeshed with.
There are probably more villains to blame. I don't know, it's too depressing to try to figure it out. Literally millions of children die annually in ways that could have been prevented with breastfeeding. I wonder how many died while you were reading this...
© by the author.
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Our mothers are just as ignorant about the effects of formula on their children -- or the effects of not breastfeeding on their children and themselves -- as mothers in the Third World.
I'm not joking. Ask them.
Ask any mother you know, whether breastmilk and formula are virtually the same substance.
Ask whether, thanks to modern technologies and advancements, formula is 'close' to breastmilk.
Ask whether formula does the same job as breastmilk -- whether, for example, it protects mothers and their children against a variety of often life threatening and/or debilitating conditions.
I'll bet you a fortune neither of us have, the majority of mothers even in Western nations say 'yes' to each question when the answer, of course, is no.
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