First Lady calls for robust promotion of breastfeeding

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First Lady calls for robust promotion of breastfeeding
First Lady calls for robust promotion of breastfeeding

Africa-Press – Mozambique. Mozambique’s First Lady, Isaura Nyusi, has called for combined efforts to promote breastfeeding, in order to strengthen healthy nutrition and child survival.

“Breastfeeding is everyone’s mission”, said Isaura Nyusi on Thursday, in the southern province of Inhambane at the launch of World Breastfeeding Week.

“There is no more adequate and perfect food for a baby than breast milk. It supplies all the nutritional needs of a child in the first months of life and has immunological properties that protect babies from gastrointestinal, respiratory, and allergic infections”, explained the first lady.

Breastfeeding, she said, also stimulates proper intellectual, and psycho-social development and visual ability. “It is cheap, and it is available at all times and at the ideal temperature”, she stressed.

In this context, she says the superiority of breast milk is indisputable, “not to mention that the act of breastfeeding promotes an unsurpassable bond between mother and child.”

According to the first lady, Mozambique has a delicate infant feeding situation, where only about half of the children are exclusively breastfed.

“We want a country free of chronic malnutrition which, despite having registered a slight decrease in recent years from 43 percent to 38 percent, is still very high, even though we know that a large part of the solution lies in ourselves”, she said.

According to Isaura Nyusi, the Covid-19 pandemic, the cyclical emergencies that the country has faced in recent years, and the terrorist conflict in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, “create conditions for increased food insecurity, and limit the ability of health professionals to provide all the necessary support for breastfeeding.”

“Even in times of emergency and armed conflict, we must do everything in our power to ensure the well-being of children”, said Isaura Nyusi, calling on health professionals, educators, employers, religious community leaders, and the community in general to continue with disease promotion and prevention activities to ensure that children grow up healthy.

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