Regarding the numbers of children dying in Uganda due to lack of
breastfeeding, I haven't been able to find the number of births, but did
find on Wikipedia that Uganda has the lowest median age of any country
known, at 15.  It has a 3.4 per cent annual population growth rate, compared
to 0.2 per cent in Sweden.  The total fertility rate is the same for 2004 as
it was in 1994, 7.1 per cent.  

I did not wade through the long .pdf explaining how the rates are derived
and what they mean, but it seems to me that if the fertility rate is more
than twice the population growth rate, there is a lot of reproductive loss
going on.  The WHO website states that the current population in Uganda is
over 28 million people.  The mortality rate for children under five is about
14 per cent, which is to say that of 100 children born, only 86 will survive
until their fifth birthday.  Girls survive slightly more often than boys.

Uganda is among countries with the very lowest proportion of births taking
place in the presence of a skilled attendant, estimated to be less than 40
per cent.  Note that skilled attendant means someone with training of some
kind in attending women in labor, not necessarily a trained midwife or
doctor.  

In such a country, it is difficult to get reliable numbers for how many
births there are, because there is no system in place to gather such data,
and so many children don't survive that they are often not registered until
they are much older than newborn or infant.  From my reading of the
demographics of the country compared to where I live I would guess there are
well over a million births in Uganda yearly.  But I think Victoria Nesterova
may be correct in surmising that the journalists reporting the health
minister's speech misunderstood, and assumed that all the deaths mentioned,
were occurring in Uganda, when they are the world numbers instead.  

The WHO website has a wealth of tables for people like me who like to
compare gross domestic product per capita, annual spending on health per
capita, and life expectancies, for example. www.who.int
Unfortunately their website isn't very user-friendly and it is often quicker
to Google what you are looking for rather than using the website's own
search window.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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