We Can All Do Something to Save the Children
September 12, 2012 · By Fr. Shay Cullen
email: [email protected]
(Fr. Shay’s columns are published in The Manila Times,in publications in Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, and on-line.)
It’s so encouraging to know that there are so many people working world-wide for the protection and well-being of children especially those who campaign for the rights of children to be breast-fed in the way nature intended by which they get the best nutrition they need to fight-off infections and have a strong immune system for the rest of their lives.
However, over the years, multinational food companies trying to find markets and earn billions in profits sell cow’s milk from the over abundance of the European dairy industry and target young children with their milk formula products. They have many tricks to get that bottle of cow’s milk into the baby’s mouth. They know once the child has a taste of formula milk, the baby gets hooked and cries for more. It’s as if it becomes addicted and tends to reject mother’s milk. Then it cries until it gets it again.
Even poor parents are persuaded by the promotions and advertisements showing fat healthy babies getting bottle-fed by Caucasian mothers. The ads give the impression that it is superior and more progressive and healthier for their children. The mothers can be illiterate and cannot read any information on the can or package of powdered milk. They don’t know that they ought to heat the water to at least 70%, mix the powder, and let it cool. More than 8,400 babies would be saved from death if they had the 36 months of breast feeding, according to World Health Organization and Unicef.
Breast feeding prevents blood infection, diarrhea, pneumonia, and diseases of the digestive trace. The health agencies say it prevents ear infection and skin allergies and, as I wrote in the previous article, it can prevent Infant Death syndrome. Also asthma, diabetes type 1, and even childhood obesity can be prevented.
They mix unheated water and use contaminated water and the child will die of the resulting sickness. The campaigners say that pushing milk formula kills babies. Hundreds of thousands of children die from this bad practice and aggressive unethical marketing of milk formula. The progressive and proud mother is one that feeds her baby with her own milk. Every concerned person ought to be advising expectant mothers to be sure to breast feed and express horror when they see bottles.
That’s why every years in May, there is an annual demonstration outside the offices of the multinational food giant Nestle in Croydon, England. Nestle is one of the biggest producers and sellers of baby milk formula. According to the Croydon protesters, they say Nestle advertises the formula saying it “protects” babies. It is a most criticized and most boycotted company in the UK and among the top four in the world, they say.
(PRIB PHOTO by JOSEPH VIDAL)
The previous article on Mother’s Milk is Best, left somewhat unanswered the reasons why the law being proposed in the Philippine congress is so “insidious” as I called it. The new proposed law is favoring the multinationals and it will restrict the Philippine “milk code” and make it apply only for the first six months of life of the baby instead of the more healthy 36 months that is highly recommended for breast-fed babies. The law presently restricts the distribution of milk formula samples as emergency food during typhoons, floods and natural disasters but the new proposed law says there will be no such restrictions.
Is a nasty way to get babies addicted to formula substitutes taking advantage of their plight and that of the parents? That’s the time when the mother needs nutritious food and baby needs mother’s milk. The new law will permit samples of formula to be available in government health clinics and permit representatives of the milk formula companies to be involved in child feeding programs.
The well-meaning legislators proposing this law are surely not aware of the implications it would have. I encourage readers to write to them at The Philippine Congress, Constitution Hills, Quezon city, Metro Manila,
If representatives Magtanggol Gunigundo of Valenzuela City, Anna Bondoc of Pampanga, Lani Mercado-Revilla of Cavite, Josephine Lacson-Noel of Malabon City, Rufas Rodriguez of Cagayan de Oro city, and Lucy Gomez of Leyte know the real impact, they will surely abandon their effort.
They have been given wrong information perhaps by the multinationals that baby formula is a good way to protect and help hungry poor children. How very wrong that is. There is nothing in this for them, no money, no benefit, no gain from it. But it will bring untold harm to hundreds of thousands of children. Let’s petition them to abandon the effort.
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