Cameroon’s first annual mother and child nutrition action week was launched in January of this year James Achanyi-Fontem of Cameroon Link told IBFAN Africa.

The event, under the patronage of Cameroon’s Minister of Public Health, aims to promote optimal mother and infant feeding and mother and child health and well-being nation-wide.

In addition to counselling on infant feeding, all pregnant women and children between zero and 11 months received free immunisation vaccines and free mosquito nets. Children between 12 and 15 months were also given appropriate medicines to eliminate all types of worms.

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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.

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Source: IBFAN.ORG

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AMEGA, the Angolan IBFAN group, has come together with the government’s Nutrition Unit in the Ministry of Health to create a Breastfeeding and Counselling Training Centre (CTAAM). This ground-breaking initiative is a triumph for the National Breastfeeding, who have been advocating for the implementation of the National Policy of Infant and Young Child Feeding and Maternal Health initiatives.

The Centre will conduct theoretical and practical sessions on breastfeeding management, complementary feeding, IYCF and HIV and Maternal Health.

The Centre will also play an important role in the revitalising of BFHI and BFCI. However, the National Breastfeeding Committee have had to meet the considerable challenges posed by a recent campaign by Nestlé that undermines on-going efforts on BFHI.

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The IBFAN Africa 7th Regional Conference was held in Maputo, Mozambique, from August 13-18, 2007, attended by some 127 participants and support staff. Congratulations are in order for Swaziland’s Youth who demonstrated their commitment when a member attended the Conference on a self funded
basis!

If you want more in depth coverage of the Conference, an electronic version (on CD or email) of the Summary Report is available on request from IBFAN Africa Regional Office’s Information Officer.

Objectives of the Conference

• To update participants on current issues/ developments on infant and young child nutrition.
• To discuss the new WHO/UNICEF BFHI training and assessment tools.
• To review progress made in BFHI and community support, and share best practices.
• To consolidate lessons from IBFAN Africa’s Capacity Project in five countries to increase visibility of IBFAN at the national level.
• To formulate strategies for scaling-up implementation of BFHI in the region through best practice.

Recommendations

• One integrated package to be created from existing training tools.
• Self-teaching modules to be developed by regional partners to overcome governments reluctance to release staff for training
• Training module and assessment indicators for community support to be developed by IBFAN Africa.
• WHO and UNICEF to support integration into pre-service training curriculum
• The BFHI training modules on the Code and HIV and infant feeding should not be optional
in African countries
• A coordinated regional response to scalingup of BFHI and other IYCF should be formulated.
• Regional partners to mobilize resources, including facilitators, for scaling-up of national
integrated packages
• Regional bodies to increase advocacy for implementation of the Code and resource
allocation to IYCF.
• IBFAN to lobby WHO for support with advocacy to governments on the need for Code
enactment.

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The risk associated with bottle feeding was highlighted once again when Nestlé was forced to recall a batch of infant formula from retailers in South Africa, Botwana and Zambia in March.

The alarm was raised when a number of complaints were received by the South African Lactogen 1.

A mixing error in the factory had led to the addition of excessive amounts of copper, iron and zinc to the formula and Nestlé has advised retailers to remove all 400g tins of Lactogen 1, batch code 73100179 L1, November 6, 2007, from their shelves.

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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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