The New York Times had a heartbreaking article today about the consequences of not breastfeeding in a developing country - in this case Haiti.
Dr. Dennis Rosen, a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, wrote about treating a child whose mother had stopped nursing him:
Opening the blanket and looking at him, I was amazed that he was still alive. His chest looked like a chicken breast picked clean of meat. His mucus membranes were pasty dry, his eyes and fontanel were sunken and his skin hung off his arms and legs as if it were three sizes too large. At 5 months he weighed less than four and a half pounds.
The gastroenteritis, it turned out, was only what had tipped him over. On further questioning we learned that his mother had stopped nursing shortly after he was born because her “milk was bad,” and had been bottle-feeding him with watered-down 7Up soda.
In spite of treatment, the boy continued to have diarrhea and died a few hours later.
Dr. Rosen explains, "The difference between breast milk and calorically depleted drinks, or formula prepared from water potentially contaminated with organisms that cause diseases like cholera, can be a matter of life or death."
Dr. Rosen reports that the belief in "bad milk" (“lèt gate” in Creole) is common and one of the main reasons why mothers stop breastfeeding prematurely.
The article goes on to tell the story of another baby who was near death after his mother stopped breastfeeding for the same reason, and how, after assuring the baby's grandmother that the mother's milk was fine, the mother began nursing again.
It's all a powerful reminder of the consequences of not breastfeeding in a developing country. And it's significant that in this case the only thing standing between health and fatal illness is a belief about breastfeeding. The good news is that these beliefs can change. I shared a video produced by a friend of mine last year which has had significant effects on breastfeeding practices. We need more, much more, of this.
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