Anti-breast-feeding measure backfires in Botswana, causing more despair

By Craig Timberg/The Washington Post

NKANGE, Botswana - Doctors noticed two troubling things about the limp, sunken-eyed children who flooded pediatric wards across Botswana during the rainy season in early 2006: They were dying from diarrhea, a malady that is rarely fatal here. And few of their mothers were breast-feeding, a practice once all but universal.

After the outbreak was over and at least 532 children had died — 20 times the usual toll for diarrhea — a team of U.S. investigators solved the terrible riddle.

A decade-long, global push to provide infant formula to mothers with the AIDS virus had backfired in Botswana, leaving children more vulnerable to other, more immediately lethal diseases, the U.S. team found after investigating the outbreak at the request of Botswana´s government.

Benefits of milk outweigh risks

The findings joined a growing body of research suggesting that supplying formula to mothers with HIV — an effort led by global health groups such as UNICEF — has cost at least as many lives as it has saved. The nutrition and antibodies that breast milk provide are so crucial to young children that they outweigh the small risk of transmitting HIV, which researchers calculate at about 1 percent per month of breast-feeding.

“Everyone who has tried formula feeding . . . found that those who formula feed for the first six months really have problems,” Hoosen Coovadia, a University of KwaZulu-Natal pediatrician and author of a recent study on formula feeding, said from Durban , South Africa . “They get diarrhea. They get pneumonia. They get malnutrition. And they die.”

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The12^th IBFAN Africa Executive Committee (IAEC) Meeting will take place from 6-10^th June 2008 in Mbabane, Swaziland. The IAEC will be adressing a number of programme and administrative issues including: endorsement of the Local Board Member; and conducting interviews for the post of Regional Coordinator.

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Youth InfoNet is an activity of USAID Interagency Youth Working Group (IYWG). Bibliographic information and research articles are available at www.youthwg.org and can be retrieved from the database by searching by topic or other criteria.

Youth InfoNet issues a monthly electronic newsletter focusing on youth reproductive health and HIV prevention which features programme resources with Web links, and summaries of published research articles from diverse countries and regions (e.g. Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa).

Developing-country users can order copies of most research articles in the database free of charge. To find out how to do this, go to http://www.youthwg.org/help/howtoorder.shtml or use the link/URL supplied with each article’s title in the electronic newsletter.

Submissions to InfoNet and the IYWG Web site are also welcome.

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Mr. Peter Oomen, who has supported the Regional Office’s Capacity Building Project since October 2006, is to take up a new post in West Africa. From May 5th onwards, he will be based in Bamako, Mali.  Mr Oomen, an expert on Organizational Development, came to the Regional Office under the auspices of ICCO, a Dutch inter-church organization which has provided funding for IBFAN Africa Programmes over many years.

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The Regional Office announces with regret that our Information Officer, Mr. Vulindlela (Vulie) Kunene has left the office to take up employment elsewhere.

The office is seeking a new information officer (see IBFAN Africa Job Vacancies in the Announcements section). In the meantime, please continue to send us news and information from countries and organizations as we will be disseminating our regular publications to all our members.

We encourage you to send as much information as possible and remind you that it is important that we learn from each other’s experiences to help overcome the many challenges that face us as IBFANer’s.

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