WNOX-AM & WIVK-FM (Knoxville, TN) Interview #12

WNOX/WIVK: August as many of you know is National Breastfeeding Awareness Month. With all the controversy about this in the news lately I thought it was important for us to deal with some of the controversies, some of the facts. So, we’re joined by the US Surgeon General, Dr. Richard Carmona, with the latest information for keeping babies healthy from his point of view. Good to have you Dr. Carmona.

SG: Thanks, great to be with you.

WNOX/WIVK: So let’s look at the…I’m going through this in my life. The woman I’m with is about to have a baby at any moment, so we’ve talked a lot about breastfeeding and I’m pretty supportive. Frankly, I think it’s the best way to bring a healthy child into the world. What do mothers and fathers need to know about this process?

SG: Well I’m glad you put it into that perspective, because we also see it really as a team approach. It’s not just the mom. It’s the fathers, it’s the families, it’s the grandmas and grandpas and society in general has to realize the importance of breastfeeding. Science indicates that babies who are breastfed are healthier. They are less likely to get diarrhea. They are less likely to get ear infections. They are less likely to get respiratory infections. And in fact, they are less likely to have problems with overweight and obesity later in life, and it enhances the bond between mother and child. So for all of those reasons it’s very important that we consider breastfeeding.

WNOX/WIVK: One of the things that’s been in the news lately, the controversy about breastfeeding in public. Mothers have been told to go to changing rooms, into the women’s room…So at restaurants and I think there was something that Bill Murray put, breastfeeding room into a stadium for a second tier baseball team he owns. You know, stuff like that that seems more and more to be in discussion circles. Do there have to be laws passed to make this thing work?

SG: Well you know I would hope that there doesn’t have to be laws passed. I would hope that just by increasing the awareness and the fact is no matter where any of us are, in the public or private sector, in business, in education, that we all recognize the importance of breastfeeding and we do everything we can not only to encourage mothers to breastfeed, but provide opportunities for them to breastfeed in the workplace, in public transportation, in many venues where moms who are carrying babies may go. Hopefully, as a society we embrace this, because we all want to raise healthy children.

WNOX/WIVK: Dr. Carmona, is this something new? Is this something that’s more avant garde, because of the public discourse? I mean I think the discourse has been helpful and this seems to be leading us around to looking at this much more and understanding that it’s the baby that should be the focus.

SG: Absolutely, and I’m glad you put it so. It’s not new. It’s really something that’s quite old. I mean breastfeeding has been around for millenniums. The fact is that up until 1950 about 100 percent; almost all pregnant women who gave birth, breastfed. But we saw that decrease over the next couple of decades. And in 1967 it went down to 25 percent of women. And now we see that at six months only 27 percent of women are breastfeeding. Even though there’s a peak right after birth, it drops slowly. A lot of it probably because of reasons you mentioned: difficulty in doing that, moms who work, transportation issues and so on. So as a society we need to embrace this because what we’d like to do is get that number up to 100 percent, or as close as possible to 100 percent of women breastfeed who are able to do so.

WNOX/WIVK: And you can do all kinds of things. There’s equipment around now to save the milk and use it later on. Those things are around and they’re pretty safe, aren’t they?

SG: Absolutely. Breastfeeding pumps, saving the breast milk, there are lots of options and there are lots of places where moms can get that information. There are Web sites like www.womenshealth.gov, www.lalecheleague.org, our Web site www.surgeongeneral.gov, hhs.gov, and cdc.gov. All provide a lot of information about nutrition, as well as support prenatally and postnatally for the mom.

WNOX/WIVK: You getting any starch from the baby food manufacturers?

SG: No, I haven’t. I have not. I mean this really has nothing to do with baby food manufacturers. They provide a good product. What we’re saying is that babies do better on breastfeeding for the first six months of life.

WNOX/WIVK: What about the controversy regarding the role of immunization these days? There are a lot of people questioning whether any or all of the vaccines should be given as they have been for many years.

SG: Well, the best science that I have seen, and I have taken time to speak to all of our experts, one of our officers, Admiral Jose Codero is a national expert on birth defects and runs the center down at CDC, some of our researchers at the National Institutes of Health, my colleagues around the country in universities, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and others. All of that information, the IOM report, we’ve looked at that and there’s no information to even remotely suggest that children should not be immunized. Think about it. If you’re in middle age the scourge that we worried about back then, polio, which was every parent’s nightmare at the time. We don’t see polio anymore because children are immunized. Measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, those diseases are very, very unlikely to occur in our society because of immunizations. Children should get immunized. I have four children; all of them were immunized on time, because I know the importance of immunization. Now the research must go on, and we may find specific nuances where we may have to change some of our practices, but that’s what science and research is about. But right now we strongly recommend that all children receive all recommended immunizations.

WNOX/WIVK: Now under the circumstances we have breastfeeding, we’re doing vaccines…Should these children be much healthier in our country than they ever have been?

SG: Well in fact, in a lot of the metrics, they are. We see that childhood diseases that I’ve mentioned have decreased or been eliminated in our society. We see that there is less problems with our children as they grow and develop. However, we shouldn’t become complacent. That’s why we termed this last year the Year of the Healthy Child because although about 80 percent of our children get their immunizations, about 20 percent don’t get one or more of their immunizations, for various reasons. There’s still 150,000 birth defects in our country every year. We can prevent about 80 percent of those if all moms get prenatal care, if all moms eat healthy, don’t smoke, don’t drink and make sure that they get good prenatal care to make sure that the growth and development of the baby in utero is appropriate.

WNOX/WIVK: It’s all an educational process, isn’t it more than anything else? Maybe something like this should be done in schools more than it is?

SG: Well it should be every place. You know raising children is probably our most important responsibility in society and doing everything we can to ensure that they are healthy and safe and secure and can realize their full potential is our responsibility. Not just as docs, and professionals in government, and non governmental organizations, but as moms and dads. We have to make sure that every mom and dad and family has all the information necessary to ensure the optimal health of the child and therefore the ability for every child to reach its greatest potential.

WNOX/WIVK: Alright, one final question before I let you go. There’s been a lot of controversy in this last or so about lung cancer and cancer in general. It seems to be on the front burner with many Americans because of some notables who have passed away in this last week or so and as a result of that people have started to study this so-called war on cancer that was started during the Nixon administration. So far about 300 billion dollars has been spent and people are questioning what results there are because we still have cancer as the number one problem in America.

SG: Well, I think that’s a very good point. What you say has truth on both sides. My predecessor Luther Terry published the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking in 1964. Forty years later, I published the 28 th Surgeon General’s report on smoking and we still have nearly a half a million people a year dying of tobacco related causes and millions more who are suffering the consequences of smoking before they die, which puts a huge disease burden on society and a huge economic burden. So tobacco use, smoking is the single largest preventable cause of death in the United States. So, where the numbers have leveled out in some of our groups, where we have reason to rejoice that there’s some improvement, it’s still a big problem in society and over 4,000 children a day start smoking, which about half of those will become chronic smokers. We must stop our children from starting smoking.

WNOX/WIVK: Dr. Carmona, good to have you hear. Thank you, Dr. Richard Carmona, the US Surgeon General.