Cuba is celebrating World Breastfeeding Week with remarkable results, and is the country with the best results in international campaign in Latin America, according to a survey carried out by the Pan American Health Organization.

Unlike other nations, In Cuba, newborns receive mother’s milk, some of them even after those six months recommended by doctors, since Cuban women have right to maternity leave for a year.

Specialists assert that breastfeeding children over their first six months helps protect them from acute respiratory and urinary infections, middle ear infections, asthma, diarrhea, allergies, diabetes, lymphoma, as well as reduces the risk of malnutrition, and helps to  healthy teeth growing and prevents mouth deformation.

During the breastfeeding period the mothers also receive benefits since that process prevent breast and uterine cancer, they have less risk of suffering from postpartum bleeding, osteoporosis and recover their weight before pregnancy, among others benefits.

Cuba is one of the 170 countries that celebrates World Breastfeeding Week in the first seven days of August, since 1990, when it was established by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Fund for Children.

The WHO asserts that breastfeeding could help to avoid the death of one and a half million infants every year and that the health and development of millions of children could improve considerably.

Therefore, WHO urges the governments of member countries to recommend breastfeeding as a slogan, a resolution from the World Health Assembly, signed in Geneva, Switzerland, instructed 22 years before.

Cuba reasserts its commitment to ensure maternal-child health. There are more than 50 institutions all over the country which offer obstetrics-maternity service. There are also banks offering human milk located in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Granma, Guantanamo, Las Tunas, Holguin and Pinar del Rio provinces.

This vital nutrient is used mainly for newborn babies, who have very low weight, have been undergone surgery due to gastrointestinal malformations or whose mothers are not able to breastfeed their children since they suffer from some illness, highlighted neonatologist Valter Martinez, coordinator of the National Breastfeeding Program.

A translation by: Silke Paez Carr

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