The Importance of Preventive Care for the Nursing Infant

To avoid falling into error, I must begin this word by defining the age of nursing, given the divergence of opinion among Lebanese mothers over this definition. Some of them set its limit at the end of the first year — and they are in agreement with the scientific definition — while others prolong its term to the end of the second year and beyond. The latter definition is a mistake that does not accord with scientific truth, but rather goes along with the proverb that says: "Your child grows strong in the measure that he has his fill of his mother's milk."

Lebanese women must work to do away with this conventional rule and to replace it with the correct one.

Immunity (the blood's power to resist disease) is divided, by medical usage, into two kinds: natural immunity and acquired immunity. The first the child draws from the blood of the pregnant mother while he is a fetus, and from her milk while he is a nursling; this store suffices him to resist disease until the sixth month of age, when it begins to decline, and the infant becomes exposed to illness unless the mother hastens to give him acquired immunity by way of inoculation and vaccination, enabling him to resist the disease by means of the live or dead germs contained in the vaccine or the inoculation.

What are the chief diseases that can be avoided by way of acquired immunity?

First — the contagious and infectious diseases:

Smallpox: the nursing child can receive the smallpox vaccine from the end of the second month, and the dangers of postponing it are three:

(a) The infant's contracting the disease itself.
(b) The fear of cerebral complications occurring if it is deferred until the fourth or fifth year.

(c) The fear of the child's inoculating himself with his own hand, in numerous places of his body — the most important of them the eyes — once he passes the sixth month of age, when he becomes able to scratch the vaccinated spot and carry the live vaccine germ with his soiled fingernails.

Typhoid fever: its germ is carried by milk, vegetables, and fruit. The mother must therefore see to vaccinating her nursing child against this disease — which inevitably costs the child's life if it strikes him while he is under a year old — when he reaches the eighth month of age; for modern feeding requires her to give the infant, on reaching that age, orange or tomato juice, bananas, apples, and puréed vegetables, and to replace one of the nursing feedings with cow's milk. Moreover, at this age the infant has begun to crawl and picks up the objects around him, and so takes in the disease germ by way of his food or his hands.

Whooping cough (or shahuq) — exceedingly dangerous if the infant contracts it; the mother should give her child the vaccine against this epidemic disease, above all if she learns of cases in the neighborhood of her home.

Diphtheria — the presence of this disease's germ in the throats of healthy persons, grown-ups and children alike, threatens the infant with the malady's coming down upon him by a hidden path; hence it is necessary that the infant be given the appointed serum to protect him from the disease.

Second — protection of the eyes: the governments of the advanced world have agreed upon following a law of the utmost importance in preserving the eyes of the newborn child. This law obliges midwives and physicians to drop a five-percent solution of silver nitrate into the newborn's eyes, for fear that the gonorrheal microbe (one of the venereal diseases) may have found its way into them during delivery.

Trachoma — widespread in our country, it strikes the child from the first weeks of his life, and it very often results in blindness, or in a weakness of sight that hinders the child from his studies. The chief ways of preventing it are combating flies, general cleanliness, and keeping the child away from afflicted parents and brothers.

Third — rickets: it strikes the child from the first months of his life. Some modern studies indicate that this disease strikes the child while he is still a fetus in his mother's womb. Its most prominent signs are a softness in the bone of the head and of the forearms. The mother can protect her nursling from this disease by taking a sufficient quantity of fish oil (vitamins A and D) and of calcium during pregnancy, and by giving the newborn fish oil and sun baths from the end of the second month of age.

This is a glimpse of the acquired immunity the infant requires. On this occasion I hope the mother will not forget that the surest of all ways to protect her child from disease is to make cleanliness general and to observe the laws of public health: by combating flies, the carriers of dysentery, trachoma, and typhoid fever, and mosquitoes, the carriers of malaria; and by keeping her child away from anyone afflicted with a cough, for fear that the malignant tuberculosis microbe be the cause of the cough and pass over to him by way of the air, of kissing, and of touching contaminated objects.

"A dirham of prevention is better than a qintar of cure."