Nursing and Survival

Author Unknown


The secret is out---what mothers and babies have known for centuries and the medical, pharmaceutical industrial complex is just now finding out. The Infant Welfare Center of Chicago has tracked the health and development of 20,061 infants. They discovered those who were breast-fed for the first nine months have a death rate of only 0.15%, those who were partially breast-fed had a death rate of 0.7% and those who were artificially fed had a death rate of 8.4%. That’s FIFTY-SIX times greater than the rate among the breast-fed babies. In Holland 80% of the infants are born at home, they also have the best infant survival rate in the world. Meanwhile, the United States has less than 20% of infants born at home and the survival rate is twenty-first in the world. Does that give us a clue, or what?

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Exclusive Breastfeeding Cuts Child's Asthma Risk   

SAN DIEGO (Reuters Health) -- Exclusive breastfeeding through 4 months of age protects against asthma for at least the first 6 years of life according to Dr. Wendy Oddy, of the TVW Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Perth, Western Australia.

 
CHlCAGO-Following a landmark study of more than 17,000 twins, researchers reported yesterday that most cases of Parkinson's disease are not due to a genetic defect, but are caused by factors that are likely environmental.  "For the first time, today we can say that for people with Parkinson's disease diagnosed after age 50, it's most commonly caused by environmental factors," said Dr. Caroline Tanner. The environmental factors are unknown, but may include chemical exposures, diet and smoking - the last of which, paradoxically, seems to lessen the risk of developing Parkinson's, she said.

Breastmilk Reduces Infection Rate in NICU
Breastmilk provided to very low birth weight, preterm infants in the Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) may decrease the chances of these infants acquiring infections in the NICU by 53 to 57 percent. Researchers from Georgetown University Miedical Center and Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health studied the medical records of 212 very low birth weight, preterm infants who were hospitalized between January 1992 and September 1993. They compared the incidence of infections in infants who received human milk with those who received formula exclusively. The researchers discovered that 29.3 percent of the preterm infants who were fed human milk acquired infections vs. 47.2 percent of the formula-fed infants. in addition, sepsis and/or meningitis occurred in 19.5 percent of the infants fed human milk and 32.6 percent of the formula-fed infants. All infections occurred after the very low birth weight infants started receiving feedings. (Women's Health Weekly, September 14, 1998)