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No Cocktail Feeding Please - Breastfeed Is Best For The Baby
No Cocktail Feeding Please - Breastfeed Is Best For The Baby
that 30% to 40% of still born babies, and 50% to 60% of those who died within 1 or 2 days, had evidence of pneumonia, as revealed by autopsy. Elaborating on the merits of breast feeding, Dr Amita Pandey says, I work in a government hospital and the only feeding modality that is advocated and patronized in our setup is exclusive breast feeding (no water, no sugar, no gripe water, no honey, no coconut water) during the first 6 months of life. We let the mother start feeding the baby as early as within 10 minutes of delivery. We put the baby, cord and all, on the mothers abdomen, and it crawls up and starts suckling. This early suckling also helps in the delivery of the placenta and the membrane. Dr Ajay Misra feels that, Though mothers are aware of the benefits of exclusive breast feeding, they are very conscious about their beauty and physical appearance and hence do not want to breast feed. In villages, mothers prefer to feed the infants on cow milk, as they have many children. According to Dr Amita Pandey, Poor mothers adhere more strictly to breast feeding than those from the higher socio economic status. Girls from well off families generally have problems in initiating and maintaining breast feeding. Many are working mothers who have to leave their baby home for long hours after a few weeks of delivery. So they either stop breast feeding the child early and/or ensure that the child has at least one top feed. They feel that if the child is not initiated into top feed from the beginning, it will not accept it later and thus create problems for them. A reason commonly cited by new mothers for not breast feeding is that they are not able to produce any (or enough) milk in the first few days, forcing them to put the baby on top feed. But Dr Amita Pandey strongly contends that whatever colostrums the mother produces during the first few days, are enough nutrition for the baby. A full term baby has enough glycogen stored in her to help her sustain for the initial two days. Moreover, if the baby is put to breast, the mother is bound to lactate eventually. It is like a cyclic processput the baby to breast, there is a cyclic release of hormones, and the mothers milk production increases. The more is the baby put to breast, the more would be the milk production. Ironically, Anuradha, mother of a one month old baby (delivered through a caesarean section in a private nursing home) told that as she did not lactate immediately after the delivery, the doctor allowed her to feed her baby on formula milk through an unsterilized cup and spoon for the first two days. Later she switched on to breast feeding the child. Similarly, another young mother Beena said that she is breastfeeding her 12 days old infant daughter, but has given her water too, with some medicine for diarrhoea. She was unaware of the harms of letting the baby drink water along with mothers milk. So there should be more awareness programmes at the community and hospital levels for young girls to understand the importance of exclusive 2| No Cocktail Feeding Please Breastfeed Is Best For The Baby
breast feeding. Doctors too need to inform them about the health benefits of breast feed for the child. The World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding as the sole source of food until an infant is six months of age, and thence a combination of it with complementary foods till two years of age. Expectant mothers need to remember that their milk is one of the most important tools in the armoury of the baby to prevent pneumonia and several other diseases, and that contrary to popular myths, the baby needs mothers milk, and nothing but mothers milk during the first six months of life.
This article is part of a Citizen News Service (CNS) series in lead up to the World Pneumonia Day, 12 November 2011. The project was managed by Abhinav Bharat Foundation and funded by the 2011 Small Grants for World Pneumonia Day Advocacy Program. We are grateful to the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC), John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, GAVI Alliance, Global Alliance for Clean Stoves, and Best Shot Foundation for their support. We would like to thank all those who were interviewed as part of this project and who took the time to share their views.
This content is available under the Creative Commons Licence Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license