INFANT FEEDING

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23527, 16 June 1938, Page 12

INFANT FEEDING

MEDICAL PROFESSION’S ACTION INVESTIGATION REQUESTED INCIDENCE OF MALNUTRITION (Per United Press Association) WELLINGTON, June 15. “ The Dominion Council of the British Medical Association at a recent meeting resolved to approach the Minister' of Health (Mr P. Fraser), and ask for an investigation to be made into child nutrition in New Zealand,” said Dr J. P. S. Jamieson, president of the New Zealand branch of the association, in a telephone interview to-night. The honorary general secretary of the association, Dr P. P. Lynch, declined to give further details of the reasons which had prompted the association’s action. It is understood, however, that it was prompted by information laid before the association by certain specialists in child welfare, who drew attention to the high incidence of malnutrition, approximately 7 per cent., among primary school children in New Zealand, and the excessive commonness of dental troubles throughout the community, which is probably more prevalent here than anywhere else in the world. These troubles were ascribed largely to diet deficiencies in infancy. It is understood, too, that the percentage system of infant feeding widely advocated in New Zealand has been questioned by specialists as having been superseded elsewhere in the world on the grounds that it involved certain dietetic deficiencies and led to malnutrition in some cases. It was stated that, while New Zealand had a very low rate of infantile mortality, she had also a shockingly low average of physique among school children in a country where they led an outdoor life and where actual starvation through poverty virtually did not exist. It was a surprising aspect of the matter that in New Zealand malnutrition was very frequently encountered in the well-to-do, better-class families, where poverty or inability to care for children could not possibly aP every case of the sort, the source of the trouble was stated to be under-feeding in infancy through either ignorance or misguidance. For some time past there had been a feeling growing m the community that the present ideas on child welfare merited reconsideration and comparison with the latest developments of the kind overseas.