Breast milk is key weapon in fight to lower Africa's child mortality rate (Independent Online Edition)

The lives of a million babies could be saved every year by the simplest and most natural remedy of them all - breast-feeding.

Field workers running a research project in remote Ghanaian villages have discovered that the surest way to keep a baby alive is for the mother to start breastfeeding within an hour of the baby being born. If the first feed from the mother's breast is delayed for even one day, they found the risk of the child dying within a month more than doubles. Early introduction to animal milk or any other substitute for mother's milk pushed the child's chance of living for a month down to barely one in 10.

In the developing world, four million babies die every year before they have reached the age of one month. The research, funded by the British Government, suggested that nearly a quarter of them, or a million babies a year, could be saved if they were breastfed from the first hour of life.



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