Task force encourages breast feeding

WASILLA -- The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force has recommended more structured education and consulting programs to promote breast-feeding in the United States. Simply telling mothers they should breast-feed or giving them pamphlets is not enough, they say.

The Task Force, which is sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, is an independent panel of experts in prevention and primary care. One of the main highlights of the recommendations is the important role of primary care clinicians in referring women to breast-feeding programs to ensure they begin and continue breast-feeding.

La Leche League is one such program. Terriann Shell, a lactation consultant, also known as a professional breast-feeding consultant, said that while Alaska mothers have a high initiation rate when it comes to breast-feeding (86.7 percent), the rate drops significantly within a couple of months. The national health promotion and disease prevention initiative implemented by the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Healthy People 2010, has a goal of making certain that 75 percent of mothers are breast-feeding right after having a baby, 50 percent are breast-feeding at six months and 25 percent at one year.

"Even for our moms on WIC and Medicare, we are around 79 percent [after birth]," Shell said. "We are doing really well at first, but then we do drop off.

"La Leche League is a great example for supporting mothers that want to breast-feed," she said. "We want every mother to meet her own personal goal, and we want to see more mothers choose breast-feeding."

Ellen Palmer is a certified nurse midwife at the Center for Woman's Healthcare in Wasilla. She said the benefits of breast-feeding far outweigh the misunderstood ease of formula feeding. Babies that are breast-fed have less upper respiratory problems, less risk of asthma, obesity and diabetes. Mothers also benefit from breast-feeding their child; it allows mothers to return to their pre-pregnancy weight quicker, and also decreases bleeding.

"We have videos on breast-feeding and proper latch-on techniques," Palmer said. "We start [teaching] from the beginning of the pregnancy."

Palmer said breast-feeding techniques and benefits are taught throughout the pregnancy, and beyond.

"At the hospital, I will go in and help get babies on the breast in the first hour of life," she said.

Palmer and her co-worker, Dr. Peggy Downing, stress that breast-feeding is not just a personal choice, it is also a health choice. They both breast-fed their children while working full-time and share their stories with the women they work with to encourage breast-feeding among working mothers. They said the biggest problem mothers face is not getting the support they need to continue breast-feeding.

"Lack of family support is the biggest problem," Downing said. "Our door

is always open, if they are still having problems during the second or third month, they can come back in and see us."