August, the eighth month in the Gregorian calendar, is significant among other months, in honour of breastfeeding mothers who are playing a key role in nurturing babies and arranging nutritious supplies.
Babies under five, pregnant mothers and breastfeeding mothers are the most vulnerable to suffering from impacts of nutritious deficiency for various reasons including family’s low income and lesser awareness of nutritious consumption.
A large number of babies and mothers have a narrow range of knowledge of false traditional food consumption customs, lesser cookery skills of preparing nutritious foods, suffering from an infection of viruses and lesser knowledge of nurturing babies. These facts are the root causes of the deficiency of nutrition for those babies and mothers.
The authorities and social organizations organize the campaign of world breastfeeding week in the first week of August every year to promote the nutrition of those mothers so as to share nutrition with their babies to become healthy and strong children in the future.
In the second week of August, the authorities and people from social organizations actively join the campaign of giving vitamin-A pills to fortify the children, immunizing the pills to the children for vermifugation and raising awareness of consuming nutrition.
The nutrition promotion week campaign will be staged for pregnant mothers and breastfeeding mothers with the active movements to give micro-nutritious pills and vitamin B1 tablets to pregnant mothers and breastfeeding mothers as well as to raise health awareness for them to efficiently consume nutritious meals and foods.
The arrangements for eliminating iodine deficiency, mostly in breastfeeding mothers falls on the fourth and last week of August when the authorities and departmental officials will provide iodized salt to the people as well as provide medical checkup on the people suffering from iodine deficiency and related diseases.
The World Health Organization-WHO recommended that it is necessary to give just breast milk to babies from the newly-born age to the sixth month and then provide breast milk together with appropriate supplementary foods to babies till two years old. In fact, the breast milk of mothers is the best nutrition and the most potent medicine for babies to have physically and mentally full growth.
As such, the authorities and charity organizations as well as pregnant and breastfeeding mothers themselves need to accelerate breastfeeding their babies for nutritious promotion in line with this year’s theme of the World Breastfeeding Day 2022: Step Up for Breastfeeding, Educate and Support.
