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Infant milk formula firms in the Philippines are
violating a law that bars them from promoting their product as a
substitute for breastfeeding, World Health Organization officials
said Wednesday.
The government and the milk
companies are currently battling it out in the Supreme Court over
the legality of a law that restricts the marketing of infant formula
in a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
“All the companies in one way
or another violate the national code and the international code as
well,” Alessandro Iellamo from the WHO Philippines office, told a
press conference.
In Asia, the Philippines and
Palau both bar companies from marketing infant formula as a breast
milk substitute for babies under the age of one.
This is in line with an
international code established by the WHO and the UN children’s
agency Unicef about 25 years ago.
WHO regional director Shigeru
Omi said failure to breastfeed led to the deaths of 16,000 children
in the Philippines each year.
Although he would not say infant
formula caused these deaths, he noted that the number of Filipino
infants who are exclusively breastfed until the age of five months
fell to 16 percent in 2003 from 20 percent in 1998.
Omi said infant formula companies
spend more than $100 million a year to market their products in the
Philippines and that Filipinos spend $465 million annually on milk
substitutes.
He and other health officials
said breast milk was still far healthier and more economical than
infant formula which they said was often improperly prepared in
nonsterile conditions.
“We need to do something about
the aggressive promotion of breast milk substitutes,” warned
Unicef nutrition project officer David Clark, saying there was
“very little systematic monitoring and enforcement.”
The officials said no company had
ever been punished for violating the law restricting promotion of
infant formula that was passed in 1986.
They said the law did not
prohibit the selling of infant formula but merely barred it from
being promoted as a substitute for breast milk which is what the
companies were doing, often with the help of health care
professionals.
At the Supreme Court, the
Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Association of the Philippines is
challenging a Department of Health order that would extend the ban
on promoting infant formula for children up to two years old.
--AFP
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