China moves to encourage breastfeeding mothers

Although China has seen greater awareness of the benefits of breastfeeding in recent years, the country still lacks qualified professionals and support staff members.
Now, to meet the rise in demand, authorities are formulating guidelines to provide training programmes and favourable policies.
Experts say breastfeeding is highly beneficial, noting that mother’s milk promotes sensory and cognitive development and protects infants against infectious and chronic diseases. In addition, exclusive breastfeeding reduces infant mortality by boosting immunity to common childhood illnesses such as acute diarrhoea and pneumonia, and also promotes rapid recovery.
The recruitment and training of a greater number of support staff is designed to prevent new mothers from falling prey to a variety of illnesses and common problems that have arisen as a result of the shortfall in qualified postnatal practitioners.
“If there is one thing that would prevent me from having another baby, it would be the horrible memory of breastfeeding for eight months after giving birth,” said Lu Lu, 33, whose son will be 3 in August.
The boy was born prematurely at 35 weeks, so he was sent to the neonatal intensive care unit for special treatment immediately after birth. Unfortunately for Lu, the lack of early skin-to-skin contact between mother and child resulted in her mammary glands malfunctioning and failing to produce enough milk.
The day after she gave birth, Lu’s breasts became swollen and tender.
“A TCM [traditional Chinese medicine] doctor placed scalding hot towels on my breasts, saying it was a common way of treating the condition, which usually occurs in the first days after delivery when the mammary glands begin to work,” she recalled. Lu knew little about health matters, so she didn’t object.
However, two days later, the pain in her breasts intensified and she realised that the treatment was making her condition worse.
It wasn’t until Lu attended the Haidian Maternal and Child Health Hospital in Beijing that she was diagnosed with severe peracute mastitis-sudden onset, severe inflammation of the breast-which may have partly been a result of the inappropriate treatments she had undergone. The condition, which can cause fever, acute soreness and even abscesses, was so serious that she had to be hospitalised.
“During pregnancy, I conducted lots of research on delivery and infant nursing, but not on breastfeeding,” Lu said. “It happened so unexpectedly; I thought breastfeeding was instinctive and most mothers would not have problems.”
In March, Zhu Dan, a well-known TV anchor, used her Sina Weibo account to relate similar problems she had while breastfeeding. She also complained about the shortage of qualified breastfeeding consultants, and urged women to share the contact details of consultants who had treated them. Within a day, she received more than 3,000 replies.
“China has an extreme shortage of professional consultants, and many mothers are grasping at phony solutions that might put them at higher risk,” said Dong Mingzhu, the mother of twin girls, who co-founded the Homebase for Breastfeeding Mothers, one of China’s biggest Internet platforms about mother and baby care.
Shortly after giving birth, Dong realised she had problems producing enough milk so she looked for a solution on the Internet. “I was astonished to discover that lots of Chinese mothers were having problems breastfeeding, but there were few sources of reliable information available,” she recalled.
In response, she began collecting clinical research papers and studies, and sharing them via Internet platforms. More women joined her activities, and in 2009 the Homebase was founded by tens of thousands of women from more than 100 cities across China. Nearly 10 years later, its website and accounts on Sina Weibo and WeChat have more than 1 million members.

Baby formula
Statistics based on thousands of questionnaires collected nationwide every five years as part of the National Health Survey show that the proportion of children age 6 months or younger who were breastfed exclusively was 58.5 per cent in 2013, a significant increase from 27.6 per cent in 2008.
However, according to Zhang Yue, director of the Children’s Healthcare Department at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, discrepancies in research methods mean it is difficult to establish if China has already reached the World Health Organisation’s target of raising the rate of exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life to at least 50 per cent by 2025.
The picture is undoubtedly better than a few decades ago. Research shows that in 1990 the exclusive breastfeeding rate for children age 4 months or younger in Beijing fell to 13.6 per cent as a result of many factors, especially the rising use of baby formula, she said.
To address the problem, the WHO and Unicef launched the Baby-friendly Hospital Initiative in 1991, and China’s more than 7,000 hospitals took part until 2002.
More recently, to foster wider adoption of breastfeeding, the 2015 Advertising Law of the People’s Republic of China emphasises careful monitoring of the promotion of baby formula and punishments for false claims.
In addition, the national health authorities provide annual training about breastfeeding to medical professionals nationwide, and all hospitals allied to the Baby-friendly Hospital Initiative are required to offer consultations via hotlines.
Liang Qi, a breast surgeon at Chengdu Women’s and Children’s Central Hospital in Sichuan province, said medical schools do not offer lectures about the treatment of postnatal problems such as severely swollen breasts or malfunction of the mammary glands, and breast surgery specialists have conducted little related research.
The outpatient department of the hospital’s breast surgery clinic sees about 30,000 patients annually, and about 40 per cent have inflammations as a result of inappropriate treatment during breastfeeding.
“Many use a wooden comb to scrape oil over their swollen breasts, which is a treatment from ancient times. Others were treated incorrectly by ‘consultants’,” Liang said.
Since 2012, the Homebase for Breastfeeding Mothers has taken the initiative by gathering together experienced support service providers and mothers passionate about promoting breastfeeding.
“We have used their experiences to devise standardised procedures and produce guidelines to train more practitioners,” Dong said.