PESHAWAR, Aug 6: The NWFP Health Minister, Dr Meher Taj Roghani has expressed concern over unethical promotional tactics adopted by the manufacturers of the infant baby milk formulas and called upon the people to encourage breastfeeding so that the mothers and their newborn babies could be saved from countless diseases.
Speaking at the Baby Friendly Hospital Award distribution ceremony at Khyber Teaching Hospital on Tuesday, she disclosed that Pakistan was importing infant milk to the tune of US $40 million annually which was highest in the world by any country.
As many as 160 manufacturers were aggressively campaigning to capture the markets for their products by arguing that these milk formulas were claimed to be substitute to mother-milk but she cautioned that we must promote a culture of breast-feeding to keep a host of ailments away from the mothers and their babies.
Breast-feeding is equally good for the health of mothers and babies and only a healthy mother could give birth to a healthy baby, she said, adding that the artificial milk had impaired the health of the mothers and their babies to the extent that Pakistan had the highest infant mortality rate in the world due to the excessive use of baby milk formulas. Bottle-feeding caused diarrhoeal diseases and inflicted host of infection on the newborn babies while the milk of the mother kept the children away from infection and ensure healthier future for them.
Chief Programme Officer of the Unicef Peshawar, Ms Zubaida Khatoon, opined that Pakistan was resourceless but it was rich in human resources and the only need was only to change the thinking of the people towards tackling health problems. Children’s health, she said, was directly linked to breast-feeding, saying that Bangladeshi mothers had reduced infant diseases almost by 50 per cent by adopting habits of breast-feeding and hand washing.
Ms Zubaida said community motivation, team work and the services of doctors, nurses and LHVs could play an important role to promote breast-feeding among mothers. She said bottle-feeding bred infection among the infants and said that about 1,000 infants died every month in the country due to malnutrition. “By adopting breast-feeding, we can save energy, diseases and money,” she said, adding that there was a dire need to produce trained health workers so that they could interact with the people at community level and promote breast-feeding.
Begum NWFP Governor Iftikhar Hussain Shah later distributed certificates among the doctors including paediatrician Dr Amin Jan, Dr Azmat Talat, Dr Bilqees Afridi, Dr Sadaqat Jabeen, Dr Dost Mohammad and Mrs Shamshad Qadir.
In her speech she said 80 per cent of the people lived in rural areas and stressed the need to start projects at village, tehsil and district levels to educate the people regarding breast-feeding. She also urged that husbands be involved in the campaign so that they could advice their wives about breast-feeding.
She said it was due to the hard work of doctors and their staff that two hospitals — KTH, Government Maternity Home hospital— have been declared Baby Friendly (BF) in the province but said that we must endeavour hard to get more hospitals declared as BF.
Chief Executive of KTH Dr Zahir Shah, Director-General of Health Services, Brig Habibur Rehman and Dr Sadaqat Jabeen also spoke on the occasion.
