BDNews24: Updates coming to child-feeding lessons: experts
December 17, 2011
Steps have been taken to upgrade medical and nursing curriculum with lessons of proper child feeding practices in Bangladesh where 43 percent of children under five are underweight and 17 percent are too thin for their age.
Experts say exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months and homemade food along with breastfeeding from seventh month to two years are the key strategies to combat malnutrition. The malnutrition-associated illnesses account for 60 percent childhood deaths, they say.
"But there is a gap between knowledge and practice among healthcare providers," said Prof Sameena Chowdhury, a member of Obstetrics and Gynecology Society of Bangladesh, which works on the updating process.
In a national workshop in the capital on Saturday, the academicians and medical practitioners identified the gaps in the medical and nursing curricula.
"It is scanty and scattered," Prof Chowdhury told bdnews24.com. "There are gaps in detailed counseling on maternal nutrition, breastfeeding, positioning and attachments, birth planning, sensitization of complementary feeding in the curriculum."
"Only because of not proper positioning and attachment to the breast, many mothers cannot ensure breastfeeding to their children," she said.
"We will incorporate it in the curriculum as soon as possible and at the same time will hold training programmes in the medical colleges so that teachers teach their students."
Nutritionists recommend homemade food twice a day in half of a 250 ml bowl each time for the babies of seven to eight months.
It is thrice a day with same amount for babies of nine to eleven months, and in full bowl (250ml) each time thrice a day for the 12 to 23 months.
The latest Bangladesh Health and Demographic Survey findings show only 16 percent start the practice between six and eight months while 43 percent starts before six months.
Some 58 percent start homemade food after one and a half year, according to the same study.
"Starting homemade food before six months is early while it is very late if someone starts after one year," said Prof Fatema Parveen Chowdhury, director, Institute of Public Health and Nutrition.
"Our focus is to start on time," she told bdnews24.com and that early initiation would cause indigestion as the babies' intestines are not prepared to digest. "If delayed, it also does not meet up nutrition requirements for growth," she said.
Dr. Jabunnessa Rahman, program specialist for Alive & Thrive, which is providing financial and technical support of the one-and-a-half-year project, said medical college teachers would be trained up so that they could teach those issues in classrooms.
"We will see whether they practice," she told bdnews24.com.