Thanks to the fact that every day there is more information and more training by health professionals, thanks to the increasing awareness about the importance of giving babies breastfeeding and thanks (or because of) the crisis, breastfeeding rates in Spain rise a little from year to year.
This does not happen in all countries, and UNICEF We wanted to focus on one of the countries where many of our readers, Mexico, come from, warning that there breastfeeding rates are too low, being among the 20 countries in the world that least practices breastfeeding.
A few days ago there was a meeting to discuss public policies for the defense and promotion of breastfeeding in Mexico and Isabel M. Crowley of UNICEF spoke about how important breast milk is when it comes to save lives and reduce risks of obesity and malnutrition. It was also urged to work on creating a health law whose mission is to promote breastfeeding.
And it is calculated that they are four out of 10 women who breastfeed their babies and who arrive at six months still breastfeeding. The rest they leave for starting work, for lack of information or help or because they directly choose the use of infant formulas to feed their babies.
Favorable policies
Seeing the situation in which breastfeeding is found in Mexico, it was decided to prepare a census of breastfeeding women in order to create physical spaces where they can do so that they can have refrigerators so that they can extract the milk and store it while the children are in the nursery.
They have also planned to create the first milk bank in the city in order to provide babies who need it with breast milk, and as a measure of public awareness: if breast milk is important for sick and premature newborns, so much so that a milk bank is created where it will be used as medicine, Just as important it is for healthy newborns.
In addition, at the meeting they found that the benefits of breastfeeding are extended at an economic and social level, both by the emotional reinforcement of children, then adults, which comes from intense contact with the mother, and by the level of health that It is acquired by drinking breast milk.
It is true?
Hopefully all those policies go ahead, that you can help mothers with information and more than refrigerators (The higher the maternity leave, the longer the mothers breastfeed), so that the women have it easier when breastfeeding their babies.
Finally, I only have to ask the mothers of Mexico: It is true? Are there few mothers who breastfeed their babies there?
