Dr. Claudio Schuftan asked me to join him in responding to something of an attack on him by the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health of Rwanda, Dr. Agnès Binagwaho. This took place in an Open Forum on Health and Human Rights run by a Harvard University group.

By clicking here you can see what we wrote and on that page you can access the earlier portions of the debate.

Occasionally one gets to be involved in a research project that makes a real breakthrough, likely to be important for public health for a long time to come. This was the case regarding this study. As the conclusions in the abstract say, “Supervised, standardized salt iodation procedures adapted to local circumstances can yield homogeneous iodine levels within the required range, overcoming a major obstacle to universal salt iodation.” This careful research showed that it is possible to achieve a reasonably good level of iodation under the low-tech production conditions illlustrated in the photo above. Click here to open the full-text pdf.

This is a 52-page report around what happens with infant feeding when HIV-positive women in two areas of Kenya practice early cessation of breastfeeding. Most of the work was done by Kiersten Israel-Ballard and Margaret Waithaka at PATH, though I wrote the original proposal to USAID with Christina Kramer and helped with planning, analysis and writing. Click here to open the report.

This letter to the editor of the journal AIDS was published on Feb 20, 2009. (Vol 23, issue 4, pp, 547-8).

Click here to open the pdf file.

Photo: This photo of a young school girl breastfeeding in public was a tourist postcard I picked up in 1987 in Lesotho. On the back it simply says “Woman weaving a basket.” As an example of how breastfeeding is viewed in a truly breastfeeding-friendly culture, that says it all.

This is another in the remarkable series of studies Dr. Jiang Jingxiong has done on obesity in children in Beijing. It’s the one that has most closely looked at infant feeding and confirms that exclusive breastfeeding, delaying introduction of solid foods beyond 4 months and delaying introduction of infant formula beyond 4 months are each independently associated with lower risk for obesity among childen < 3 years old. Click here to open the full-text pdf file.  

This paper presents findings from the first study that looked at the efficacy of iron fortified rice. It used an expensive form of iron and later work showed that a cheaper form also works. Nevertheless, the impact here was substantial and, given how important rice is as a global staple food, efforts to fortify rice definitely deserve more attention.

Click here to open the pdf file.

Photograph by Hernando Flores.

This article in the World Journal of Pediatrics is based on a masters thesis that Dr. Jiang Jing Xiang did with me as her supervisor at Uppsala University. It uses data from the first national vitamin A deficiency survey done several years earlier throughout China.

Click here to open the pdf file.

IMAGE: from http://www.thailine.com/

Photo from Erika Andresen’s (formerly Bergström) thesis. 

Click here to download the PDF file.

This is a power point presentation I gave in Dubai at the 1st Regional Conference on Human Lactation:
Breastfeeding for Healthier Generations. HIV and infant feeding policy making has come far in the past few years, but as of mid 2008, there is still a lot of confusion about when an HIV+ mother who is breastfeeding should stop. More importantly, how should the decision as to whether it is acceptable, feasible, affordable, sustainable and safe (AFASS) to stop be taken?

Click here to download the presentation.

This is a presentation I gave at the First Regional Conference on Human Lactation, Breastfeeding for Healthier Generations on November 14, 2007, Dubai.

Click here to download the presentation.