Philippines, Cambodia tap breast-milk benefits

Elly Burhaini Faizal,
The Jakarta Post, Colombo | Mon, 08/15/2011

The Indonesian government may take a page from the policies of its ASEAN neighbors to better promote breast-feeding and improve infant health.

“The tradition of breast-feeding in our country keeps continuing despite challenges to breast-feeding practices,” Ou Kevanna, Cambodia’s Health Ministry’s National Nutrition Program director said, referring to the 97 percent of Cambodian mothers who breast-feed.

Kevanna said that pre-lacteal feeding, or feeding newborns other liquids before initiating breast-feeding, was wide spread before the Cambodian government intervened.

“It was a common thing for lactating mothers in Cambodia to give water to their newborns,” Kevanna said on the sidelines of the Bi-Regional Meeting on Scaling Up Nutrition in Colombo, Sri Lanka, last week.

The Cambodian authorities implemented programs to improve infant and young child feeding practices by mitigating problems caused by poverty and working mothers.

“We regulate the marketing of products for infant and young child feeding and have made some interventions to improve services for infants and young children by setting up baby intensive care units as well as providing infant and youth child feeding counseling at health facilities,” Kevanna said.

According to the Cambodian Health Ministry, 73.5 percent of all local infants under 5 months old were exclusively breast-fed in 2010, up from 60 percent in 2005 and up from around 10 percent in 2000.

UNICEF and the World Health Organizaton (WHO) have recommended that infants be exclusively breast-fed for their first six months and consume breast milk until 2 to bolster their immune systems.

More than 87 percent of Indonesian children under 2 were breast-fed and around 15 percent were exclusively breast-fed, according to a 2010 basic health research report.

The rate of pre-lacteal feeding Indonesia was 71.3 percent, according to the report, while other mothers fed their children with alternatives such as formula or honey-water mixtures.

The government is set to launch another campaign to promote breast-feeding this month by issuing a regulation.

Under the new rule, all offices and public spaces will have to provide adequate breast-feeding rooms, while ordering the construction of more mother and baby patient care units.

In Philippines, neonatal mortality and sepsis were reduced by not separating newborn children from their mothers in the early stages of breast-feeding, according to Tommaso Cavalli-Sforza, the WHO’s regional nutrition advisor for the Western Pacific.

The change in practice was introduced under the “Unang Yakap” newborn care program, which also includes early skin-to-skin contact between mothers and their infants.

Unang Yakap, which means “first embrace” in Tagalog, refers to skin-to-skin contact between mothers and their newborns.

“Non-separation during early breast-feeding can protect infants from dying from infections,” Cavalli-Sforza said.

Francesco Branca, the WHO’s director of nutrition for health and development, also promoted early breast-feeding.

“We should not criminalize women who decide not to breast-feed their babies for health reasons. It’s important to deliver wider exposure to lactating mothers by, for example, establishing baby intensive care
hospital.”

“If children are kept in the room with their mothers, they won’t be unnecessarily fed with formulas.”