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Protect breastfeeding – A shared responsibility

05 August 2021 | Story Dr Chantell Witten | Photo Supplied

Opinion article by Dr Chantell Witten, Division of Health Professions Education, University of the Free State.

World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated every year from 1-7 August. In South Africa, it coincides with Women’s Month and gives us the opportunity to reflect on how far we have come and how far we still have to go to achieve gender equity in different spheres of life. Even more reason for us in the academic sphere to stop and think about the areas of support that may still need attention and effort to correct.

In the context of protecting breastfeeding this would speak to the Code of Good Conduct in the Labour Act which affords pregnant and breastfeeding women protection and support. In extreme cases it means protection from exposure to hazardous substances, but in the general setting of the work environment this relates to workplace support for a private and safe place to express breastmilk. One institution made headlines when a staff member was secretly videoed while she was expressing breastmilk. What is also needed is to put in place a policy that guides on how university property such as a fridge may or may not be used to store expressed breastmilk, or how to deal with a manager who insists on holding meetings in a woman’s scheduled milk-expressing time slots. The law may indicate that you are entitled to two 30-minute time slots to express but it is quite another issue to get your colleagues to accommodate or respect your biological needs.

Protecting breastfeeding

Besides the protection of employees, the government in its commitment to improve child health and nutrition has committed to protect breastfeeding from the undue influence of the infant-formula industry by implementing the recommendations of the International Code for the Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes. South Africa approved the Regulations Relating to Foodstuff for Infants and Young Children (R991) to control the marketing and promotion of infant formula by limiting how the product may be marketed and how the industry may engage with the public and child health and development professionals, in particular.

While many are aware of the prohibition to advertise or to promote and distribute free or incentivised sales of infant formula, many may not be aware of the limitations placed on academics and researchers. The academic and research fraternity has had a long and conflicted relationship and history with the infant-formula industry. Many departments and individual researchers have received funding, conference sponsorship and gifts from the infant-formula industry. In the early 2000s at the height of the HIV epidemic, the Department of Health recommended that women living with HIV should not breastfeed and instead provided six months of free formula milk, inadvertently implying that health professionals approved of infant formula. While the national Department of Health has since stopped the distribution of free infant formula through the programme for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) from 2011, many health professionals trained in the early years continue giving mixed messages to mothers and display limited skills to promote and support breastfeeding.

So how do we protect breastfeeding in the academic setting?

As more women enter academia, managers and the institutional leadership need to be cognisant and purposeful in developing a breastfeeding culture by granting women the protections afforded them by the Labour Law. Furthermore, in all spheres of academia and research, and as an institution, we need to guard against conflict of interest and conflicted relationships with the infant-formula industry. We need to do due diligence by raising the awareness of R991. All child health and development professionals should be acquainted with R991 through their curricula, and we should individually and collectively be accountable in our conduct to protect, promote and support breastfeeding as a human right, an investment in health and development, and for a sustainable future. There can be no greater dividend than to invest in optimal nutrition for infants and our children. They are the future.

News Archive

Dr Francois Deacon appears in international film, Last of the Longnecks, due to research on giraffes

2017-04-04

Dr Francois Deacon was invited by the producer of Last
of the Longnecks to be part of a panel handling a question-
and-answer-session about the film.
Photo: Supplied

A great honour was bestowed on a researcher at the University of the Free State (UFS) when he was invited to the preview of the documentary film, Last of the Longnecks. Dr Francois Deacon, lecturer and researcher in the Department of Animal, Wildlife and Grassland Sciences at the UFS, who also has a role in the film, attended the preview at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Smithsonian National Museum in Washington DC, in the US, in March this year. The preview formed part of the DC Environmental Film Festival.

The Environmental Film Festival in the US capital is the world’s leading showcase of films with an environmental theme and which aims to improve the public’s understanding of the environment through the power of film. During the festival, the largest such festival in the US, more than 150 films were shown to an audience of 30 000 plus.

Dr Deacon was invited by the producer of Last of the Longnecks to be part of a panel handling a question-and-answer-session about the film directly after the show. He described it as the greatest moment of his life.

Role in the film Last of the Longnecks

“My role in the film was as the researcher studying giraffes in their natural habitat in order to understand them better, so that we may better protect them, and be able to provide better education on the problem in Africa,” says Dr Deacon.

“Together with Prof Nico Smit, also from the UFS Department of Animal, Wildlife and Grassland Sciences, Hennie Butler from the Department of Zoology, and Martin Haupt from Africa Wildlife Tracking, we were the first researchers in the world to equip giraffes with GPS collars and to conduct research on this initiative,” he says. This ground-breaking research has attracted international media attention to Dr Deacon and Prof Smit.

“Satellite tracking is proving to be extremely valuable in the wildlife environment. The unit is based on a mobile global two-way communication platform, utilising two-way data satellite communication, complete with GPS systems.

“It allows us to track animals day and night, while we monitor their movements remotely from a computer over a period of a few years. These systems make the efficient control and monitoring of wildlife in all weather conditions and in near-to-real time possible. We can even communicate with the animals, calling up their positions or changing the tracking schedules,” says Dr Deacon.

The collars, which have been designed to follow giraffes, enable researchers to obtain and apply highly accurate data in order to conduct research. Data can be analysed to determine territory, distribution or habitat preference for any particular species.

Over a period of three years (2014-2016), the Last of the Longnecks team from Iniosante LLC captured on film how Dr Deacon and his team used the GPS collars in Africa to collect data and conduct research on the animals.

“With our research, which aims to understand why giraffes are becoming extinct in Africa, we are looking at the animal in its habitat but not only the animal on its own. If the habitat of these animals is lost, they will be lost as well. Therefore, our focus is on conservation and better understanding the habitat. The giraffe is only a tool to better understand the habitat problem,” says Dr Deacon.

Since the beginning of his research Dr Deacon and his team have had six new collar designs, with animals in four different reserves being equipped with the collars. The collars use the best technology available in the world and make it possible to determine how giraffes communicate over long distances, and how their sleep patterns function. Physiological and biological focus is placed on the giraffe’s stress levels, natural hormone cycles, and milk quality in cows.

Photo: Supplied

Experience at the film festival

“Absolutely amazing. Totally beyond our frame of reference as South Africans.” This is how Dr Deacon describes his experience of the three days in Washington DC during the film festival.

“It was an absolute honour to be part of the global preview of the film and to be able to work with Ashley Davison, the director of the film, and his team. I am just a rural farm boy who dreams big, and now this dream is known worldwide!” he says.

The film, which will be launched in April, will be screened in South Africa on the National Geographic channel in May 2017. Meanwhile, the film will also be shown at eight other film festivals in the US.

Work will start on a follow-up documentary in October and Dr Deacon is excited about the prospect. A mobile X-ray machine will be available from October. Internal sonars could also be performed on each of the animals. Researchers from around the world will form part of the team which will be led and co-ordinated by Dr Deacon and his co-workers at the UFS.

Former articles:

18 Nov 2016: http://www.ufs.ac.za/templates/news-archive-item?news=7964
23 August 2016: http://www.ufs.ac.za/templates/news-archive-item?news=7856
9 March 2016:Giraffe research broadcast on National Geographic channel
18 Sept 2015 Researchers reach out across continents in giraffe research
29 May 2015: Researchers international leaders in satellite tracking in the wildlife environment

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