Breast milk, the best milk: Still a challenge for us
Mother's breast milk right after the birth is the best gift for the newborn. No other thing in this world is as beneficial as the small measure of putting the child on its mother's breast within one hour of birth! After the initiation of breast milk, the second best thing for your child is exclusive breastfeeding — means only breastfeeding and nothing but breast milk up to first 6 months of the baby's life. It has tremendous health benefits which provides all required and critical nutrients to children and protects them from deadly diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhoea. According to the study published in the Lancet — breastfeeding initiation within the first hour of life reduced neonatal mortality by up to a third! This issue is so critical for child survival that four parameters of Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) has been identified as crucial indicator for tracking under 5 child survivals to achieve Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4. The indicators includes: initiation of breastfeeding within 1 hour of birth, exclusive breastfeeding up to 6 months, complementary feeding at 6-9 months and continued breastfeeding till 20-23 months. In Bangladesh, only around half of the mothers initiate breastfeeding within one hour of birth. Whereas if all newborns in this country were to be breastfed within one hour of birth, about 37,000 neonatal deaths could be averted annually. Similarly, around half of Bangladeshi women gave only breast milk to their child for the first six month of their life, leaving the other half in grave danger of formula feeding. Study shows that children born in a health facility or children being born attended by a health professional are less likely to get breast milk within one hour of birth compared to their counterpart born in home. The culture of providing pre-lacteal feeds (other liquids/ foods given during the first three days of life) is widely practiced with more than half of the newborns. Due to weak coordination, limited coverage and ineffective community activities, low consumer awareness about the dangers of formula milk, absence of specific guidelines for IYCF, inadequate recognition of complementary feeding, questionable quality of services in baby-friendly facilities, lack of a standardised monitoring system is pulling the pace of breast feeding development. To overcome this situation, we need comprehensive and effective activities at social level and special emphasis at family level. Individual concern and family support is the crucially needed for having a healthy child followed by policy, social, organisational and community based activities.
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