The Minnesota Breastfeeding Coalition (MBC) announces additional grants for workplace lactation programs. See the Business Case for Breastfeeding under Breastfeeding in the Workplace tab for more information

StarTribune article

Surgeon General: Women Face Too Many Obstacles in Breast-feeding, Including Hassles at Work

By Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press

WASHINGTON – How long a new mom breast-feeds can boil down to hassles at work, whether her doctor ever stressed how super-healthy it is, even whether Grandma approves. Read more . . .

Washington, DC—Three out of four women in the United States provide their infants with the healthiest start in life by breastfeeding, and today Surgeon General Regina Benjamin called on the entire nation to support the removal of barriers to this important public health behavior. The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Support Breastfeeding is an unprecedented document from the nation’s highest medical source, calling on health care providers, employers, insurers, policymakers, researchers, and the community at large to take 20 concrete action steps to support mothers in reaching their personal breastfeeding goals.

The Colorado Breastfeeding Coalition recently completed a series of three YouTube videos designed to motivate, educate and inspire moms to keep breastfeeding after returning to work. Each video brings together clips of real moms telling their stories about how and why they continued breastfeeding after going back to work, the obstacles they encountered, the strategies that helped them succeed, and the outcomes they enjoyed — from health to bonding — and how their employers benefitted too.

The three videos located at www.YouTube.com/user/cobfcvideos are:

• -Breastfeeding and Working – An Overview 
• -Employer Perspective on Accommodating Nursing Employees
• -Colorado’s Workplace Accommodations for Nursing Mothers Act

The Office on Women’s Health is updating the publication
An Easy Guide to Breastfeeding. An Easy Guide to Breastfeeding provides information and encouragement to women and their loved ones. It explains the benefits for baby, mom, and society, and also provides frequently asked questions and answers about breastfeeding. This publication is the first among our current series to be updated. New versions for African American and American Indian and Alaskan Native women will also be developed in the near future, as will guides in Spanish and other languages.

Help us choose the new cover by voting for your favorite by clicking this link!

http://www.womenshealth.gov/pub/easy-guide-breastfeeding/vote.cfm

Melissa Bartick, MD, MSc^a, Arnold Reinhold, MBA^b
aDepartment of Medicine, Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; and
^bAlliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, Boston, Massachusetts

Background and Objective: A 2001 study revealed that $3.6 billion could be saved if breastfeeding rates were increased to levels of the Healthy People objectives. It studied 3 diseases and totaled direct and indirect costs and cost of premature death. The 2001 study can be updated by using current breastfeeding rates and adding additional diseases analyzed in the 2007 breastfeeding report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality… Full Article

Published online April 5, 2010
PEDIATRICS (doi:10.1542/peds.2009-1616)

Babies who are fed directly from the breast in early infancy tend to consume less later in infancy than their bottle-fed counterparts, new research suggests.
http://lifestyle.kstp.com/global/story.asp?s=12455916

Find more items like this at http://lifestyle.kstp.com

Copyright 2010 KSTPWN

This is the Minnesota Breastfeeding Coalition Web site’s News Page.  We expect the following posts to be appropriate, timely, and insightful.