Bottle Baby Disease

In modern society, breastfeeding is often inconvenient and working mothers may need all the help they can get to stay with it. In the United States, breastfeeding legislation has been enacted in most states and has helped to change the public opinion about breastfeeding. In economically less developed societies, however, the choice of whether to breast or bottle feed has another dimension to it entirely.

Mothers in poor countries have been the targets of massive promotional campaigns of infant formula manufacturers. As a result, they have come to believe their breast milk is inferior to the purchased commercial formula. Shortly after birth in a maternity hospital, their babies are fed free formula. As they leave the hospital, mothers are given gifts of commercial infant food. Since it comes from the hospital, they assume it is the best possible food for their babies. Using the samples, they believe their little ones are being well cared for. They do not realize that the formulas lack the immunological protection their own milk would provide, and that now their babies will be subject to diseases they would not have gotten otherwise. The formula packages say to sterilize the water and the bottles but the mothers often cannot read, and neither clean water nor the fuel needed o boil it is readily available.

Soon the mothers find that their babies have become ill. At the same time, they find that they can't afford to buy the formulas. But if they try to go back to breast feeding, they find they cannot, because their milk has dried up. Free samples are a powerful marketing tool because once a woman stops breastfeeding, even if only for a few days, her milk supply dries up. The purpose of the donated formula is to create a dependency on commercial products by undermining breastfeeding.

In order to stretch what little formula they can afford to buy, these unsuspecting mothers dilute it with water. Then they watch helplessly as their babies get diarrhea so severe that all they do is cry in pain. Their fragile bodies, deprived of adequate nourishment, become progressively weaker, racked by parasitic and infectious diseases.

These mothers love their babies, and would do anything to help them. In desperation, they often go without food themselves in order to save money to buy a bit more formula for their suffering little ones. Sometimes the older children also go hungry so the infant can have more formula.

These mothers don't know that when Third World babies are exclusively breastfed, mortality rates drop 95 percent. They think that in using the formulas they are feeding their children the modern way. The think bottle feeding is glamorous, convenient, highly scientific and nutritionally superior. That's what the advertisements have told them.

The number of mother enacting this pathetic drama every day is so enormous that it constitutes one of the great human tragedies of our time. According to the Action for Corporate Accountability more than 1,500,000 babies die every year from the cycle of infection and malnutrition known as Bottle Baby Disease, almost all of them in the Third World.