Milk formula goes on trial in Asia

Health experts at a summit in the Philippines this week are urging East Asian countries to tout breast milk's benefits.

By Simon Montlake | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 22, 2007 edition

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Bangkok, Thailand - For decades, moms everywhere have been told that "breast is best" for babies. Healthcare experts say that message goes double in the developing world, where clean water for bottle-feeding is a luxury and, they say, breast-feeding can be a key factor in an infant's survival.

But global efforts to promote breast-feeding are stalling in East Asia, where many working mothers in urban areas are opting instead for infant formula.

The result, say UN officials and Asian health campaigners meeting this week in the Philippine capital of Manila, is a decline in breast-feeding in several countries, even while it's rising in Africa and other developing regions.

While the East Asian average for exclusive nursing is 35 percent for the first six months, that figure falls to 5 percent in Thailand, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In Vietnam, the breast-feeding rate almost halved in four years, falling from 29 percent in 1998 to 15 percent in 2002.

Experts at the regional conference, organized by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and WHO, say countries are backsliding in their efforts to tout the health benefits most physicians associate with breast milk. One of reasons for this trend, says a UNICEF expert, is multinational companies that dominate sales of breast-milk substitutes.

Health experts say US companies are among those using aggressive marketing to hawk infant formula in Asia's dynamic economies, the same kinds of tactics that sparked a boycott campaign of Nestle products in the 1970s. This led to the adoption in 1981 of a global marketing code for such products.

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