Science

Advice to Botswana's AIDS Moms Backfires

For the last decade, global health groups working in Botswana have encouraged mothers with AIDS to stop breast-feeding their children. But a on a diet of formula instead of breast milk, children are even more vulnerable to other lethal diseases, found US scientists charged with investigating what now appears to be a horribly backfiring plan. […]

Mother_and_baby
For the last decade, global health groups working in Botswana have encouraged mothers with AIDS to stop breast-feeding their children.

But a on a diet of formula instead of breast milk, children are even more vulnerable to other lethal diseases, found US scientists charged with investigating what now appears to be a horribly backfiring plan. Reports the Washington Post,

The findings joined a growing body of research suggesting that supplying formula to mothers with HIV -- an effort led by global health groups such as UNICEF -- has cost at least as many lives as it has saved. The nutrition and antibodies that breast milk provide are so crucial to young children that they outweigh the small risk of transmitting HIV, which researchers calculate at about 1 percent per month of breast-feeding.

"Everyone who has tried formula feeding . . . found that those who formula feed for the first six months really have problems," Hoosen
Coovadia, a University of KwaZulu-Natal pediatrician and author of a recent study on formula feeding, said from Durban, South Africa. "They get diarrhea. They get pneumonia. They get malnutrition. And they die."

Part of the problem, found the researchers, is that formula isn't always available. When clinics ran out, parents were forced "to buy cow milk or feed their children with diluted porridge or even flour and water."

It's hard to know what to say at moments like these. It's too easy to hastily point figures -- or, conversely, make excuses. But development projects so often go wrong because they don't foresee on-the-ground realities: another example would be standards for tuberculosis control that required multiple drugs administered over long periods of time.
Because of inconsistent drug supplies and the difficulty of ensuring that people followed the program religiously, drug-resistant TB strains emerged.

All the good intentions in the world don't mean a thing if they aren't carried out with painstaking practicality.

Step to decrease AIDS in Botswana backfired fatally [Washington Post]

Image: W.K. Kellogg Foundation