Health concerns: ‘Lack of breastfeeding weakens children’

QUETTA: In a bid to promote health awareness in Balochistan, approximately 1,200 health workers have been trained to impart knowledge about healthy ways of living in the province’s remotest areas. At a conference organised by the Provincial Nutrition Cell in collaboration with the Unicef, medics said that the health workers are to discourage the use of unhygienic formula milk to infants and to promote breastfeeding among infants. Some 90% of the children suffer malnutrition due to lack of breastfeeding. Cultural barriers and illiteracy are reasons why the practice is looked down upon. Expressing concern over the child mortality rates in Pakistan, health practitioners noted that some 72 infants out of 1,000 did not live past their first birthday.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 11^th, 2012.