Under Bangladeshi law, selling infant formula without a doctor's prescription is a punishable offence. Yet from cities to villages, in pharmacies, supermarkets, grocery shops and online, formula is handed over to anyone who asks, an investigation by Dhaka Post has found.
In Shikarpur village, Uzirpur, Barishal, Shahnaz Parvin was buying formula at a local pharmacy for her four-and-a-half-month-old son. No doctor had advised it, she said; she had seen videos on Facebook, and after six weeks the baby no longer wanted breast milk. The shopkeeper, Babul Howlader, said only one or two buyers in 100 bring a prescription and that he did not know selling without one was illegal. Visiting at least 12 markets and 27 shops in Dhaka, the reporter found formula openly displayed, although display is also banned.
According to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics' Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2025, 57 percent of babies under six months are now exclusively breastfed, down from 65 percent in 2018; the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2022 also recorded a fall from 65 to 55 percent. Officials at the Institute of Public Health Nutrition put the formula market at no less than Tk 4,500 crore a year.
Dr S K Roy, chairman of the Bangladesh Breastfeeding Foundation, said the 2018 success rested on awareness work reaching remote areas, which stopped when funding ended in 2019; since then online promotion of formula has spread and the law has gone unenforced. Professor Khaleda Islam of Dhaka University's Institute of Nutrition and Food Science called for curbs on misleading advice from self-styled nutritionists on social media and for nutritionists to be brought under government registration like doctors.
A government study cited in the report found that 32 percent of doctors accept benefits from companies and promote formula in about 29 percent of cases, and that prescriptions are written without any tests in 44 percent of cases.
Section 4 of the 2017 rules on marketing breast-milk substitutes and infant foods allows only a doctor registered with the Bangladesh Medical and Dental Council to prescribe formula, with proper evidence, when it is essential to save a child's life or reduce a health risk. Experts say strict enforcement and a revival of community awareness about breastfeeding are now urgent.
The report is by Mahtab Limon of Dhaka Post.
Photo: a tin of infant formula (file), chelly cruz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Source: Dhaka Post
Comments
(0)