Infant feeding practices of mothers in an urban area in Nepal.

BACKGROUND: Child health in developing countries including Nepal is a matter of serious concern as the prevalence of malnutrition among children continues to be high with 48.6% of children under five in Nepal being underweight. Since infant feeding practices adopted by mothers play a major role in influencing health of these children, there is a need to study the infant feeding practices prevalent in different areas in order to have pragmatic approaches to solve this problem. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A cross sectional study was conducted among mothers who attended the immunization clinics of 18 wards of Pokhara municipality area. They were interviewed with a semi-structured questionnaire on various aspects of infant feeding. RESULT: A total of 168 mothers were interviewed and prevalence of breastfeeding was 99.4% (167). Only 43.5% of the mothers initiated breastfeeding within one hour of birth and 60.5% were practicing exclusive breastfeeding at 5 months. Almost 40% of the mothers started complementary feeding before the recommended age of 6 months and 22.5 % delayed introduction of complementary feeding beyond the recommended age. CONCLUSION: Breast feeding practices adopted by mothers of Pokhara urban area are still lacking in terms of late initiation of and early starting of complementary feeding. There is a need to educate the mothers regarding proper infant feeding practices.