Botswana
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News from Botswana
Botswana has had a number of successes in enforcing their national law on marketing of breastmilk substitutes. Hussein Tarimo, Botswana’s expert on the International Code and champion of their strong national law, has said that action has been taken to bring the companies into line with the requirements of the law. Successes include:
- Promotional materials for baby foods are no longer appearing in the streets or in the local newspapers after fines were imposed on distributors.
- One French company has completely fulfilled all the requirements for IF.
- Idealising baby face is gone from all Tiger brand baby foods.
- Visits to health facilities by company reps have been stopped.
- Selling of expired products has been stopped.
- No more products written in foreign languages.
- Companies can no longer use the excuse that there is no national law.
- The removal of the Nestlé idealising flying birds and change to local languages has been agreed upon with the company.
Mr Tarimo also said that, since Nestle South Africa is producing infant formula for the whole region and outsourcing from Brazil, there is an urgent need to network in order to develop a harmonized position for the region. Otherwise, he warned, it is likely that the company will take advantage of trivial differences in national laws and their interpretation to continue with violations.
Posted by ibfanafrica on 13 May 2008 | Tagged as: Botswana, Watch the Code
Anti-AIDS measure backfires in Africa
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.”
Posted by ibfanafrica on 14 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Botswana, Breastfeeding, HIV
