Cincinnati Children's Scientist is Author Of World Health Organization Breastfeeding Report
It's estimated that exclusively breastfeeding infants for six months and continuing breastfeeding for at least another year could save the lives of 1.5 million infants each year.
To support and promote child survival through breastfeeding efforts in developing countries around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) has issued a new report whose main author is Ardythe Morrow, PhD, a scientist at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.
"This document provides the rationale and guidelines for community-based interventions to promote and support optimal breastfeeding," says Dr. Morrow, director of the Center for Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Cincinnati Children's and an internationally recognized expert on human milk. "Achieving optimal infant and young child feeding requires a comprehensive approach that includes community-based action integrated with hospital initiatives and appropriate national policies."
"It is not enough to help a mother initiate exclusive breastfeeding," adds Joy Phumaphi, assistant director-general, family and community health, at WHO. "She needs to be able to go back to an environment that is conducive to sustaining appropriate feeding practices and to access skilled support when she needs it."
The WHO report is a collaboration among WHO, the LINKAGES Project of the Academy for Educational Development and the United States Agency for International Development. It will be distributed throughout the world and used by many governments and nongovernmental agencies to guide policy and practice in developing countries. Among the report's recommendations for improving rates of breastfeeding are to:
- Develop partnerships of health professionals, community organizations and volunteers to establish, monitor and achieve breastfeeding goals in their communities. These partnerships should be connected with the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative, an important national and international effort to ensure that birth hospitals support breastfeeding.
- Create media and educational messages that promote specific "do-able" actions that mothers can achieve in that environment to improve their infant feeding practices.
- Train and deploy lay breastfeeding counselors, as well as health professionals to provide mothers with timely access to information and support in the community setting.
- Establish women's support groups and make them available to breastfeeding women in the community.
It is recommended that mothers in all countries exclusively breastfeed their babies for the first six months of life. In developing countries, continued breastfeeding is recommended up to at least 2 with the timely addition of appropriate complementary foods at 6 months. Compliance with these recommendations has significant child health and nutritional benefits.
A series of studies by an international group of child health researchers known as the Bellagio Child Survival Task Force has identified optimal breastfeeding in the first year of life as the most important strategy for ensuring child survival. These studies indicate that improving breastfeeding throughout the world could save as many as 1.5 million lives a year, given the significant protection breastfeeding provides infants against diarrhea, pneumonia and serious infections in newborns.
Dr. Morrow is the principal investigator of a program project grant funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development to study the role of human milk in infant nutrition and health. She has established an interdisciplinary Human Milk Research Program at Cincinnati Children's that is investigating the role of human milk in relation to infectious disease, allergy, obesity and the environment and is working with the Every Child Succeeds program to improve breastfeeding locally. She and her international colleagues are studying the innate components of human milk to determine which ones confer protection from infection. They hope to be able to synthesize the active components in human milk for future clinical applications.
She and others at Cincinnati Children's are also developing an international health program that will extend the research, teaching and patient care mission of Cincinnati Children's to the global arena.
Contact Information
Jim Feuer, 513-636-4656,
jim.feuer@cchmc.org
