Editorial
Shibir’s militancy: it’s a do-or-die
challenge for all
How is it that the government is completely inactive against the fascist forces of the Islami Chhatra Shibir who run amok on the campus of Rajshahi University and are not only threatening cultural activists and secular and progressive groups but issuing open declarations to burn alive any citizen who participates in them? The threat of assassination of cultural activists was issued by the student front of the Jamaat-e-Islami and reported in Saturday’s New Age. It is a defiance of the rule of law and a challenge to the secular democratic forces. It is unbelievable that some fascist groups should issue public announcement of burning a group of people alive on ideological grounds and yet the government will do nothing. No response even when the challenge is thrown to its own power and authority. The words and deeds of the Shibir activists have reached a stage where it can no longer be called religious fanaticism but imposition of a fascist agenda based on suppression of culture and all kinds of dissent and freedom. The Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islami Chhatra Shibir and its fundamentalist and militant allies are steadily moving in that direction. The total government inaction in restraining them is a boon to them. Instead, the government does everything to restrain those who try to resist Islamist extremists out to vandalise art and culture and bulldoze their way to the ultimate establishment of theocracy in the country.
Last Thursday the Shibir activists assaulted a female student of the university and threatened others for staging a drama, as part of their protest programme against the dismantling of the Baul sculptures. The Shibir men got away without any punishment or even a warning. The police did arrive and ‘calmed the situation’ which means they made no difference between perpetrators and victims. This was succour to the marauders and on Friday, according to a New Age report, they threatened to burn alive some individuals belonging to the cultural organisation Udichi. The report further mentions that a militant organisation, Anjuman Al-Baiyanat, announced reward for those who could kill the people declared as ‘murtad’ (apostates). This is an open declaration of selective terrorism. While the government has imposed an open ended state of emergency on the grounds of safeguarding the law and order situation in the country, it does nothing when radical Islamists are issuing death threats against citizens. All must unite to resist it. It is a challenge not only for the progressive secular sections but also for the moderate religious groups which are uneasy over the perverse zealotry in the name of religion but have not acted against it thus far.
Revamp highway police units and
set them safety targets
The tragic motor accident that killed 10 people and left scores more injured on Thursday on the Dhaka-Chittagong highway is not only symptomatic of poor road safety in the country, but also has much to do with a wider problem of poor enforcement of safety regulations in general. While the collision may have claimed some lives on impact, according to a New Age report published on Friday, one of the vehicles involved in the collision was carrying flammable acids in drums, which easily spilled, caught fire and killed many of the ten now dead in the ensuing blaze.
Tough questions emerge out of this tragedy. Why was such flammable and volatile material being transported without the necessary safety measures in place to prevent spillage? If petroleum products can only be transported in trucks with the necessary safety measures to prevent easy leakage and with adequate warnings relating to the flammability of the cargo, it is unacceptable that the same standards will not be imposed on trucks transporting acid or other hazardous cargo.
Bangladesh’s road safety records are perceptibly pathetic. According to official figures, the number of deaths from road accidents annually is a staggering 4,000, with the Accident Research Centre under the Dhaka-based Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology suggesting that the real number of casualties could be ‘three times the official figure’. In money terms accidents cost the country roughly Tk 5,000 crore annually or about two per cent of the GDP according to the centre. While a certain number of accidents may perhaps be unavoidable, as the trend of media reports reveal, most in the country’s highways are the result of either reckless driving, poor maintenance of vehicles, or both. In the past, reports in the media have also revealed that the bureaucracy and corruption that plague the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority mean that potential applicants for driving licenses will often get their papers through illegal channels. While driving is after all a skill in which excellence needs not be accompanied by bookish knowledge, minimum awareness of road safety rules are a must for reckless drivers not only pose a threat to their own safety but also to that of others.
The highway police unit formed three years ago remains almost inactive largely because of a lack of funds and logistics, with high quality patrol vehicles co-opted by top ranking police officials for their own use, according to reports. The authorities must immediately revamp the highway police unit and set them targets for responding to emergencies and to ensure the adherence to traffic laws on the highways in an effort to reduce the number of deaths from traffic accidents every year. Meanwhile, it is high time that the BRTA is reformed to reduce the amount of corruption that reportedly plagues it while enforcing tough punishments for those who break the law.
Milking the misery of
third world infants
Infant formula hardly needs toxic contaminants to kill babies, especially in the third world. Is ‘kill’ too strong a word for what these companies do? Perhaps. But what other word could fittingly describe the outcome of subtle advertising that convinces mothers that these products are better for the baby than breast milk, with a system of bribes for doctors and nurses in place to reaffirm this lie? Mahtab Haider asks
AS THE scandal of baby formula tainted with melamine continues to unravel more than a month after the story broke in the media, over 50,000 infants are ill, some of them in critical condition, and four are dead in China. Across the third world, there are perhaps millions of babies who are also suffering similar fates, undetected and untreated because of poor healthcare services, or poverty itself. In Bangladesh, a series of tests by various agencies have revealed inconsistent results. Tests carried out by the chemistry department of Dhaka University detected the presence of melamine in eight brands — Yashili 1, Yashili 2 and Sweet Baby sourced from China, Dano from Denmark, Red Cow and Diploma from Australia, and Nido Fortified Instant and Anlene from New Zealand. Subsequent tests under the supervision of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations have claimed that not all eight brands are tainted, spurring calls for the government to make the report public.
But even as the melamine scandal gradually loses its potency to shock us, in Bangladesh, as with many other parts of the least developed world, we know that the worst may be yet to come. Past experience shows that the recalled melamine-tainted products of the major manufacturers of baby formula may very likely be repackaged and shipped off to parts of the world where health safety guidelines are weak and their enforcement even weaker. In some cases, lesser companies will buy huge quantities of this tainted milk and re-brand it for export, at prices so cheap that they emerge the most popular in countries like Bangladesh. In some cases, the poor family who will typically go for the bottom of the range product is also lured by gifts such as toys, pacifiers, and feeders.
According to the International Baby Food Action Network, a coalition of more than 200 groups in 100 countries, there have been over 70 recalls of baby milk products dating from 2000. These recalls involved horrifying revelations, with infant formula contaminated by heavy metals and deadly bacteria, to name two. ‘Contamination of baby milk products is an ongoing and dangerous issue that involves not only products from Sanlu in China, but also international brands such as Nestlé and Wyeth,’ an IBFAN press release from last month claims. ‘The real shame is that many mothers are being duped into buying industrial baby milk products,’ aggressively marketed ‘using toy and bottle giveaways. Misleading advertising by national and multinational companies has led parents to buy expensive artificial baby milks.’
But infant formula hardly needs toxic contaminants to kill babies, especially in the third world. Is ‘kill’ too strong a word for what these companies do? Perhaps. But what other word could fittingly describe the outcome of subtle advertising that convinces young mothers that these products are better for the baby than breast milk, with a system of bribes for doctors and nurses in place to reaffirm this lie. After all, more than 3,800 infant deaths worldwide could be prevented daily with a campaign that promotes breastfeeding and warns parents of the dangers of formula.
In Bangladesh alone, the lives of about 314 infants could be saved daily with a similar effort, causing infant mortality rates to drop by a third. The question then is, ‘Why aren’t we stepping up our campaign to promote breastfeeding?’ Well, largely because the formula giants are always able to outspend most governments to ensure that their lies get wider coverage. According to the charity Save the Children UK, ‘for every pound spent by the [UK] government to promote breastfeeding, over £10 was spent by leading manufacturers to promote baby milk and foods. While funding for companies’ advertising campaigns grew by a whopping 37 per cent during (2006/7), UK government spending on breastfeeding promotion has steadily gone down since 2004/05.’ And if that is the plight of the UK government, imagine the plight of governments across Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. Bangladesh imports over $32 million worth of infant formula every year, worth roughly 100 times more than the total funding that NGOs such as the Bangladesh Breastfeeding Foundation and the government can annually set aside for their campaigns to promote breastfeeding.
In Bangladesh, the popularity of formula has skyrocketed especially because of the influx of Chinese substitutes that are cheaper than their European and Kiwi competitor’s products in recent years. The cycle of events that kills or at least endangers the health of babies who are fed formula are as simple as they are deadly. Because of a lack of access to safe water, most babies fed on infant formula in the country end up also absorbing a deadly dose of bacteria and germs which attack their immune systems already weakened by a lack of breast milk. When a mother breastfeeds a baby, not only has her immune system attacked and killed any germs in the milk, she is also passing on invaluable nutrients and proteins that help build baby’s still-developing immune system. In the case of formula-fed babies, it is then a double whammy of a weak immune system and the delivery of germs that could eventually cause a host of fatal complications.
According to UNICEF and WHO, ‘Breastmilk is unquestionably better for infant feeding than infant formula… no infant formula contains antibodies to protect infants against infection as breastmilk does. No infant formula is as safe to administer as breastmilk is. And no infant formula is as affordable to families as breastmilk is, providing the perfect nutrition while protecting them from infections.’
Research also confirms that even malnourished mothers are still in a better position to serve their baby’s nutrition needs compared to infant formula. But the advertising campaigns by manufacturers of infant formula knowingly use pictures of healthy European or American babies on posters that line the walls in rural and urban hospitals, with many families being led to believe that feeding their child formula will make him/her healthier and fairer of complexion. No doubt, this tactic manipulates the premium that Bangladeshi society places on a fair complexion. Needless to say, most Bangladeshi families are hard pressed to come up with the Tk 350 a week or more needed to feed their newborns imported infant formula, and so many mothers are forced to over-dilute the milk-powder in order to make it last. This becomes the deadly ingredient that finally takes its toll on the infant’s health, since the baby is effectively being fed a great deal of bacteria infested water, and too few nutrients for her immune system to fight them. As Dr Iqbal Kabir of the Dhaka-based ICDDR,B points out, 25 years ago he saw few, if any, infants among the diarrhoea patients brought into the hospital for treatment. Today, over 70 per cent of the patients admitted to the hospital are infants.
It has been 31 years since the famous Nestlé boycott of 1977 which started in the US and quickly spread to Europe for more or less the same allegations that the company and its competitors face today in the third world. In 1974, the British charity War on Want had published a pamphlet describing Nestlé as ‘the baby killer’ in its bid to reveal the effects breast milk substitutes were having on infants, and though the corporation won its day in court on technical grounds, the charity was directed to pay only a token compensation given the veracity of its accusations. The ensuing controversy prompted the World Health Organisation to draw up the International Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes in 1981, described as ‘a minimum requirement’ to be adopted ‘in its entirety’. ‘In 1984, Nestlé agreed to implement the code, and the boycott was officially suspended by the groups who had done most to promote it,’ writes Joanna Moorhead in an article published in the Guardian last year.
Thirty-one years on, though Nestlé is not alone in this, infant formula manufacturers continue to violate the code, sometimes flagrantly, sometimes with subtlety, exploring loopholes in the code, and poor legislation in many countries to aggressively push their products. One of the most pernicious strategies they use is bribing paediatricians into prescribing formula to newborns. While there has been a significant wave of awareness within the medical profession about the dangers of prescribing breast milk substitutes, there are many who cannot resist the perks of paid-for foreign vacations and expensive gifts that the formula manufacturers can offer. And given the subversion of traditional knowledge and medicine by the Western scientific establishment, responsible for ‘miracles’ such as the cholera vaccine or the cure for scourges such as tuberculosis, it is not surprising that parents will often consider the doctor’s endorsement enough to switch away from breast milk. And even as doctors begin to wisen up, the manufacturers have infiltrated into the next layers of the medical field: nurses and hospital staff. Since these are sometimes the individuals who have the most interaction with patients, nurses are paid kickbacks for suggesting to mothers that shifting to formula is better for the baby.
As the scandal of melamine-tainted milk slowly drops off the news agenda and is elbowed out of the public psyche by more ‘pressing’ concerns, the time for worry now begins for countries like Bangladesh – with weak institutions that cannot monitor the standards of food imports, and cannot launch media campaigns to warn of their dangers. After all, it could not be any clearer that the industry’s ability to act with even a modicum of morality, be it the Swiss giant Nestlé or the Chinese minnow Sanlu, is non-existent.
mahtabhaider@gmail.com
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