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From:
Susan Burger <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Lactation Information and Discussion <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 11 Feb 2013 07:58:02 -0500
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Thank you Pamela for digging up the articles that I didn't have the time to look up.  I was beginning to understand how people feel when they get old and the historical record starts to deteriorate and events that they experienced start to be denied by future generations quoting .  My filing cabinet of articles got destroyed in the Helen Keller International offices on 90 West Street on the South Side of the Trade Tower.  I sort of saw it as a blessing because a filing cabinet full of articles takes up a lot of room in a small Manhattan apartment, but every now and again I miss them.  Helen Keller International had and even bigger library (with an impossible classification system) full of programmatic documents.  These were an important record of educational materials, assessments and evaluations of the work that was actually being carried out.  Those documents never do make it into academic institutions and those were permanently lost.  That would hold all the pre-HIV pamphlets and posters and written documentation of radio and TV spots of the central role of breastfeeding in all of the work of that era.

Robert Black was one of my many professors at Johns Hopkins and he worked on diarrheal diseases and breastfeeding which were intimately linked due to the fact that the risk of diarrhea so dramatically climbs when infants are artificially fed.  Similarly, the late Steve Esrey (who died of a rare form of bone cancer) with whom I had the pleasure to work with on a book chapter, dedicated his life to looking at the relationship of water and sanitation interventions on nutritional outcomes.  He too put breastfeeding as central to infant nutrition. If anyone every wants to look at the era before HIV and before Unicef took the central pillar of their program and diluted it out to the periphery -- these two authors have published many interesting articles on the connection between diarrheal diseases and infant nutrition.  

In the 1980s the more common criticism of ORS is similar to the criticism that Diane Wiessinger has about breastfeeding management.  ORS is a downstream intervention.  If you only use ORS babies will continue to get dehydrated and you are not dealing with the underlying problem.  Similar to the problems arising from baby unfriendly hospitals.  If you continue to have hospitals that have procedures that interfere wit the establishment of breastfeeding, mothers and babies will continue to experience unnecessary problems with breastfeeding.  

The 1980s was the international Decade of Water.  There are PILES of program documents that should be available through the US government freedom of information act by the WASH project about these programs and what worked and did not work.  To sum up my impression, most of those problems were associated with not including the primary stakeholders -- women.  

It is sad that such a wonderful push with breastfeeding at the core was not only dropped before it came to fruition, but that it has sunk into obscurity so deep that people aren't aware that it actually happened.

Best, Susan Burger.

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