MOTHER'S MILK CAN'T BE BETTERED
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
This is breast feeding week in the Philippines, when children's rights advocates try to persuade mothers that their natural milk is best for their babies and its a child’s right to be breast-fed. We all have to promote breast feeding as best because powerful multinational corporations and their local subsidiaries are aggressively promoting infant formula as a replacement.
Filipino mothers spend 21.5 billion pesos a year on infant formula and endanger the health of their child. That's about 2000 pesos a month per child according to Unicef. What could be more insidious than persuading thousands of mothers to abandon breast feeding not knowing that mother's milk is far superior, besides being free.
Breast-fed babies are shown to be smarter, healthier and more intelligent when they grow up than those brought up on infant formula. The immunity of a healthy mother is passed to the child through breast feeding and so are other healthy traits. The bonding and sense of love, security is irreplaceable especially by a rubber topped plastic bottle.
Thousands of children die because of it. They have lower immunity to common disease. Mothers are so poor that they dilute the milk formula and even use contaminated water when they mix it sometimes in dirty bottles. They live in unsanitary conditions and dirt, insects and rats contaminate the powder. Bottle fed babies are 25 times more likely to die of diarrhea as a result Unicef says. Philippine mothers spend an estimated 430 million pesos (US$9.4 million), every year on medical expenses for their sick children.
Nurses, community health workers and even doctors are bribed and persuaded by corporations with rewards to recommend formula-feeding. It all adds up to big profits for them, making billions of pesos off the ignorance of the poor. Bottle feeding a new born can make it dependent on the formula and it will reject the mother's milk leading to serious harm to the child.
Apparently the nurses, health workers and even doctors are given rewards to promote infant-formula. The advertising has worked. Many mothers have been persuaded that breast feeding is something unscientific, old fashioned and primitive and even a practice to be ashamed of as a mark of poverty.
Baby formula advertising sometimes shows rich looking mothers in beautiful homes bottle feeding babies. Some are Caucasian looking, a play on the racial inferiority that 600 years of colonial western culture inculcated among the occupied people. The Philippine Department of Health is trying to get much of the advertising banned but the multinationals and their local representatives opposed it and got a Supreme Court injunction to stop the ban being implemented. The legal and moral struggle goes on.
The evidence that formula-fed children are more sickly and weak that breast-fed kids is well documented. Filipina mothers have paid the price – as much as P430 million pesos spent on medial expenses. Unicef said in its 2001 report titled, State of the World's Children, that “Improved breast-feeding practices could save an estimated 1.5 million children a year”.
Mothers who breast-feed their children are healthier too and lose unnecessary weight and avoid getting diabetes, breast cancer, uterus tumors and lumps, according to a recent statement of Philippine Health Secretary Francisco Duque III.
Breast feeding rates in the Philippines are at as very low 16 percent. Besides wrongly thinking “formula-fed is best” the most common reason given by mothers world-wide why they formula-feed their children is they don't have enough mother's milk. This is totally wrong says Dr. Howard Sobel of the World Health Organization (WHO) the chief promoter of breast feeding.
Every mother has enough milk and it's not measured by
breast size. The baby's stomach is only the size of half a thumb and as
soon as breast feeding begins more and more mother's milk is produced by
the body. It's a matter of demand and supply, said Dr. Sobel, as the
more the baby suckles more mothers’ milk is produced. It is highly
recommended to breast-feed a child for two years for the child to become
the healthiest, strongest and most intelligent of children. Nothing in
education can make up for it, it's the best for children. Now who
doesn't want that? Let's go tell the world.
