The government has decided to import food supplements for acutely malnourished children though an alternative home-based preparation developed in the country in 2007 is working well at different hospitals. Experts observe that the move also goes against the health ministry’s campaign for the promotion of breast feeding and home-based food for the proper growth of children and against the use of such formulas.
Central Medical Stores Depot officials said that the depot already initiated the process of importing therapeutic milk powders F-75, F-100 and multiple micronutrient milk powder MNP 5 in accordance with a requisition for the procurement of the food supplements given by the Institute of Public Health Nutrition.
The specification committee was scheduled for November 14 to meet to discuss this requirement, the officials said, adding that the meeting was postponed and it would be held soon.
‘We will be very careful as it is a child food supplement,’ the depot director Syed Iftekhar Uddin said, adding, ‘CMSD has never procured any such food supplement.’
Iftekhar said that he had already talked to officials concerned including the Drug Administration director general and the National Food Safety Laboratory chief in this regard.
‘The Drug Administration director general has requested me to be very careful as these are very sensitive items and many products have flooded the market in the name of food supplements,’ he said.
He said that the depot decided to include representatives of the National Food Safety Laboratory and of the Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution in the specification committee.
F-75 and F-100 are therapeutic milk powders used to treat sever acute malnutrition of children over six months of age. F-75 is considered the ‘starter’ formula, and F-100 the ‘catch-up’ formula.
Experts said that the import of such food supplement would pave the way of booming of immoral business of formulas causing health hazard.
‘These formulas are not good for children and we are always against the formulas,’ said Bangladesh Breastfeeding Foundation chairman SK Roy, also former the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh senior scientist.
Centre for Women and Child Health research coordinator Khurshid Talukder, also a paediatrician, said that although the World Health Organisation recommended formulas like F-75 and F-100 for the treatment of acute malnutrition of children, a 2006 study at the Institute of Child and Mother Health at Matuail in Dhaka found that the use of a special home-made preparation was just as effective as the formulas.
Paediatricians and researchers of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh and Institute of Child and Mother Health in 2006 jointly developed the high calorie preparation that could be easily prepared at a house or hospital with milk, sugar and edible oil, Khurshid said.
This high calorie food preparation is being used in the ICDDR,B hospital and some other hospitals for treating severe acute malnourished children and several food preparations were developed by ICDDR,B scientists, SK Roy said.
‘We are always against any kind of formula,’ said Bangladesh Paediatric Association president Ruhul Amin.
He said, ‘There was pressure from business groups and international syndicates to import food supplements for long time and this move might be a part of that pressure.’
Institute of Public Health Nutrition national nutrition service programme manager SM Mustafizur Rahman told New Age that they submitted th requisition of importing the formulas although they usually preferred the use of home-based food.
He, said, ‘Mothers do not know how to prepare the food for their children. So, we decided to import formula until we can develop a formula by using our local product.’
The Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2011 found 41 percent of children under the age of five were stunted and 36 per cent were underweight.
In 2009 the Indian government told UNICEF to stop using Plumpy’Nut for the treatment of acute malnutrition in the country over concerns about importing and becoming dependent on ‘foreign food.’ The Indian government had also raised a question whether ready-to-use therapeutic food was better than hot-cooked food.
Courtesy of New Age
