Contact:
Kent Donahue
Kent.Donahue@flhealth.gov

407-858-1418

ORLANDO, FL - The Florida Department of Health in Orange County (DOH-Orange) celebrates World Breastfeeding Week 2022 during August 1-7, 2022. This year’s theme is Step up for Breastfeeding: Educate and Support.

The World Breastfeeding Week 2022 theme encourages everyone to inform people about their role in strengthening the chain of support for breastfeeding, anchor breastfeeding as part of good nutrition, and engage with individuals and organizations along the chain of support for breastfeeding.

Protecting breastfeeding ensures:

• Good health and prevents malnutrition, including under and over nutrition. Breastfeeding has positive lifelong health effects on infants, children, and mothers such as lower incidence of respiratory infections and ear infections for infants and children and reduced risk of breast and ovarian cancer for mothers.  Breastfeeding also reduces the risk of childhood obesity compared to formula feeding.
• Food security even in times of crisis. Breastfeeding provides food security to infants from the very beginning of life, contributes to food security for the whole family, and ensures food security for babies even in times of household or widespread disasters, such as hurricanes.
• Improved Economics and Reduced Inequalities. Breastfeeding can help break the cycle of poverty for families, which impacts hunger and malnutrition. Breastfeeding provides an equal start for everyone. With no additional burden on household income, breastfeeding is a low-cost way of feeding babies and contributes to poverty reduction. Breastfeeding can also reduce costs to the health care system and employers by decreasing costs of hospitalizations, medications, and reduced absenteeism.

• Breastmilk is a sustainable and environmentally friendly resource.
• Breastfeeding is readily available without needing other supplies.
• Breastmilk production does not require the use of energy for manufacturing and does not create waste or air pollution.

DOH-Orange’s Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) offers breastfeeding resources and staff to help breastfeeding mothers. Call 407-858-1494. They have International Board-Certified Lactation Consultants who have a high level of specialized knowledge in breastfeeding to assist clients. In addition, DOH-Orange WIC has Breastfeeding Peer Counseling Programs. The trained peer counselors are chosen from the same socio/economic/ethnic groups as WIC clients and have successfully breastfed their own babies. Breastfeeding peer counselors provide mother-to-mother basic breastfeeding education and support to pregnant and breastfeeding moms.

For more information about the Florida WIC program call 1-800-342-3556 or visit www.FloridaWIC.org. To learn more about National Breastfeeding Month and the benefits of breastfeeding visit www.usbreastfeeding.org, www.llli.org or www.flbreastfeeding.org.

About the Florida Department of Health

The department, nationally accredited by the Public Health Accreditation Board, works to protect, promote and improve the health of all people in Florida through integrated state, county and community efforts. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at @HealthyFla. For more information about the Florida Department of Health please visit www.FloridaHealth.gov.