Click here to open the file.

One of my few forays into issues related to breastfeeding in the USA. The answer is simple. Instead of giving it for free, make infant formula cost slightly less than evaporated milk.

 This letter to the editor was published in Journal of Human Lactation 16(4):292-3, 2000. While WIC authorities responded to Tuttleés article, they did not respond to my letter.

Click here to download the pdf file.

The World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA) for whom I act as Research Task Force Coordinator (and have previously worked with in other ways, including being elected as international representative on its steering committee), asked me to write a draft for their Action Folder for World Breastfeeding Week 1998 on this theme. Several others participated in fixing up the text, particularly Naomi Baumslag. WABA’s experts turned it into a pleasure for the eye and brain that you will find on their site if you click here.

Scientists have long been concerned about the impact of maternal malnutrition on breast milk quantity and quality and thus on infant growth and health.

When viewed from the other direction, there is general agreement that lactation can increase the nutritional stress on malnourished women, especially when it overlaps with more than one trimester of the next pregnancy. It is common that women lose weight during sustained lactation.

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This paper was published as an appendix to a report of a Commonwealth Secretariat/WHO meeting in London in 1984 to examine economic aspects of supportive measures to working women in developing countries. But it was originally written and presented at another Commonwealth meeting on the WHO Code in Harare in January 1983.

Click here to download the pdf file.

In May 1982, the Swedish International Development Authority (now Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) held a seminal meeting examining what they had funded in breastfeeding, both research and programs. Attached is the background paper I was asked to write for the meeting. Here one can see my early ideas on expanding the concept of “breastfeeding promotion” to include protection and support. I expanded on this later that year in “Infant feeding policy options for governments.”

The meeting was attended by Annelies Allain, then with GIFA, the IBFAN group in Geneva. When she mentioned that there were many small groups in developing countries that needed minor support to become important forces in protecting breastfeeding, SIDA said they could not deal with many small proposals. I suggested that IBFAN take on administering a seed grant project, applying to SIDA for only one lump sum of money; that happened and was how IBFAN expanded in its early years.

Click here to open the pdf file. (This document is history. You certainly can ignore the request for my permission to cite it!)

This is the French translation of FAO Food and Nutrition Paper No. 11, written by Stina Almroth and I based on research done in Ghana and the Ivory Coast in 1977, and funded by NORAD.

Click here to open the scanned pdf file.

This was based on work Stina Almroth did in 1977 in Cote d’Ivoire, largely on the “material” costs of breastfeeding versus replacement feeding while I did the same work, largely on time costs in Ghana. FAO published it in 1979 as their contribution to the International Year of the Child and said it was their “best seller.”

Click here to open the book, scanned into pdf format. 

FAO had it translated into French and published in 1980; that version is also available on this website.

This is a longer report of the study Stina Almroth did in Cote d’Ivoire and I did in Ghana in 1977 for FAO with funding from NORAD and under the supervision of Dr. Michael Latham of Cornell University. In particular it includes a much more detailed literature review.

Click here to open part 1.

Click here to open part 2.

Click here to open part 3.

This image is a photo of a breastfeeding statuette that I bought “on the street” in Abidjan in 1977, something I’ve continued to do since then all around the world. (But in Africa you have to do some research to find out where these kinds of handicrafts actually are made.) I suspect that the proportion of local handicrafts that picture breastfeeding tells us something about how “breastfeeding friendly” the culture is. The place I found the most was by far in Peru. At the other end of the spectrum is Malaysia (at least Penang where I’ve spend many months living and working with WABA) where, despite looking in many places over the years, I’ve found very little.

In 1977, I was part of a small team that did very comprehensive work on mapping out the economic issues involved in infant feeding in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.  It was published in English and in French in a book as FAO’s Food and Nutrition Paper #11 in 1979, and an even longer version came out as a Cornell monograph. This article in FAO’s nutrition journal just gives a brief summary.

Click here to download the pdf file.

Image: Child’s drawing, Bangladesh