If most new mothers feed their babies to breast feed during the first six months of life, would be an annual saving of about 1,000 lives and billions of dollars, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.
"The United States 13 billion U.S. dollars of the cost of more than 911 per year to prevent suffering and deaths each year includes as our breastfeeding rates far below medical recommendations," the report said.
The World Health Organization says babies exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life "to achieve optimal growth, development and health to achieve." WHO is not alone in its recommendations.
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Family Physicians, and the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention all agree that breast milk alone is sufficient for infants and children under 6 months old no.
However, a 2009 report card nursing by the CDC show that only 74 percent of women with breast milk, but 33 percent are still exclusively breastfed at three months and only 14 percent are still exclusively breastfed for six months.
Dr. Melissa Bartick, one of the new study co-authors, says most of the extra costs each year could be saved "as 80-90 percent of women exclusively breastfed for only four months, and if 90 percent of Women would sometimes up to six months to breastfeed. "Bartick landlady is a ruse - a doctor who specializes in treating hospitalized patients - Cambridge Health Alliance, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and mother of two children.
Bartick and his co-author Arnold Reinhold found that most of the extra costs due to premature deaths. Nearly all, 95 percent of these deaths are attributed to three causes: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), necrotizing enterocolitis, seen especially in premature babies and in which the lining of the gut dies and lower respiratory tract infections such as pneumonia.
Breastfeeding has been shown that the risk of these diseases and seven others studied by the authors of the study to reduce.
Bartick 10.56 million U.S. dollars estimated for each of the estimated 911 dead children. The researchers also direct health care costs and lost parental work time. They do not include the cost of formula, which is another additional cost to the mothers not breastfeed.
There are many factors that contribute to low rates of breastfeeding in the United States, and Bartick says that mothers should not be criticized because they receive conflicting messages, and often the lack of support since they were born Their children.
He says the top priority must be the performance of maternal health improvement. Bartick refers to the 2007 CDC survey of hospitals and birth centers, each marked structure to determine how well they comply with the recommendations to promote women to breastfeed.
According to this study, Bartick says, "Hospitals in the United States scored a 63 - that's a D."
Bartick said many hospitals delay urgent and immediate skin to skin contact between mother and child, who can make things difficult for the baby to act on his natural instinct to suck.
Mothers should also be better informed about the importance of breastfeeding and the need for appropriate support after leaving the hospital where the problems because the baby is not properly held on and still not enough to eat.
Dr. Alan Fleischman, medical director for the March of Dimes, was not surprised by the findings of the report. Fleischman, who has worked on the study, says that as a new mother struggling with breastfeeding, you can go to a situation in which "suggests the grandmother of stupidity to stop in and Instead, the formula."
He believes that the mothers and grandmothers of young mothers should be educated on the benefits of breastfeeding, because for their generation, their children formula feeding was the norm.
