<<Giving away formula is no worse than giving away cheese>>
A serious health problem in Africa is the free baby formula-giveaway program. I personally knew many nurses and other health care workers in Africa who saw babies die, quickly or slowly, because the mothers' milk dried up about the time the supply of free milk was gone, quel coincidence. The desperate, impoverished mothers would try to buy what formula they could (leaving less protein for their older children), would dilute it with (impure) water to stretch it, the child would become malnourished, get diarrhea, waste away, get sick, die. Google will provide hundreds of links.
"In developing countries, differences in infection rates can seriously affect an infant's chances for survival. For example, in Brazil, a formula-fed baby is 14 times more likely to die than an exclusively breast-fed baby."
nrdc.org
To the formula-producers it is worth the financial cost of supplying cans of milk to lactating women whose infants will soon enough die, or be able to consume so little milk they become malnourished, because in casting their net wide, they will capture the portion of mothers who will be in a position, even when it's at great sacrifice to the diet and health of their other children, to keep buying.
". . . Four different influences can turn bottle feeding into a tragedy: economic, hygienic, nutritive and immunologic. The effects of these influences are threefold. First, the infants literally starve. Second, they are more exposed to infection. Third, they do not have the immunological protection that comes in breast milk...
Formula is relatively expensive: for a three-month-old child, it can cost 50 to 60 per cent of the minimum wage in some developing countries, plus the price of the equipment. Because of the high cost there is a tendency to stretch the formula by overdiluting it. [NB: often with unsterile water] This practice leads to nutritional marasmus, a condition resulting from severe protein and calorie deprivation."
religion-online.org
This is a phenomenon reacted to blithely by some. Those who know the association yet continue to defend the practice as a legitimate "marketing" technique often call themselves "libertarians," though in Africa, while I knew libertarians, I knew no one among them that defended this particular marketing technique. |
