USA Radio Network (National) — Interview #4

USA: Goodness, I have two things on my sheet here, either Year of the Healthy Child or National Breastfeeding Awareness Month. Which way would you like to go?

SG: Well both of them are equally important and in fact, the Year of the Healthy Child encompasses the National Breastfeeding Month of August.

USA: Ok, well let’s start at the Year of the Healthy Child then. Why the whole year? What are the important messages? Why, why, why?

SG: Last year we looked at how are children were doing generally as a nation, and in fact we had a lot to be proud of. Immunization rates were up, teen pregnancy was down, and teenage smoking seemed to be leveling off. On the other hand, we still had room for improvement. About 80 percent of our children were getting the immunizations they needed, however there were 20 percent that still were falling through the cracks in one or all of their immunizations. We see that there are still 150,000 birth defects every year, of which maybe 80 percent are preventable through good prenatal care, moms taking folic acid, vitamins, getting good postnatal care, and so on. So that there was room for improvement so we decided to emphasize this past year the Year of the Healthy Child and within that, breastfeeding is extremely important because we know that breastfeeding leads to healthier babies.

USA: That goes right into. If you could explain a little bit more, why is it so important that I understand the health aspects and are there other aspects? What about public awareness, social awareness?

SG: Well clearly social awareness is important, what we call health literacy. Very often moms aren’t aware of the importance of breastfeeding, or the dads or the families. So it’s important that the entire family is aware and supportive of this concept because the studies show that babies who are breastfed have less diarrhea, less ear infection, less respiratory infection and are less likely to become overweight or obese later in life. And that’s real important now because we have a child epidemic of obesity before us.

USA: Is there someplace; is there a clearinghouse, someplace people can go to pick up this information?

SG: You bet. In general for the Year of the Healthy Child you can look on the Surgeon General’s Web site, surgeongeneral.gov, or hhs.gov which is Health and Human Services. Also, one of our sister agencies the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, cdc.gov has a lot of this information that we’ve spoken of as it relates to the Year of the Healthy Child. And then another Web site that’s good for the breastfeeding is www.lalecheleague.org, provides information specifically about breastfeeding. So all of those and then many others are available also that you can find online.