China promotes breast-feeding amid tainted milk scare
With her one-day-old son propped against her in a hospital bed nursing, Qi Wenjuan says she has no desire to feed her child with infant formula.
With her one-day-old son propped against her in a hospital bed nursing, Qi Wenjuan says she has no desire to feed her child with infant formula.
“I don’t trust baby formula,” the first-time mother said, lying in the maternity ward of Beijing’s Tiantan Hospital. “There are too many quality problems.”
Qi, however, is a rarity in China, where most newborns are fed – sometimes exclusively – with infant formula within the first six months of their lives.
China’s rates of breast-feeding are among the world’s lowest. But health workers and the government are trying to revive the practice, and a drumbeat of safety scares over commercially produced milk is giving them new leverage. Visitors to internet forums for new parents are posting comments about the benefits of breast-feeding and the potential hazards with formula.
How many infant formula crises do we still need to convince mothers and policy makers that breast is best?
“The risks of formula feeding are increasingly clear to the Chinese public,” Dr Robert Scherpbier, chief of health and nutrition for Unicef China, said in an email this week. His comment came after China’s government ordered a recall of formula imported from New Zealand because of contamination fears.
