Impact of the Brazilian national breast-feeding programme on mothers in greater São Paulo.

A broad-based national breast-feeding programme was launched in Brazil in 1981 that was preceded by an evaluation of infant feeding habits in two metropolitan areas of the country. This paper reports the initial findings of an evaluation of the programme in Greater São Paulo that was carried out in 1987, 6 years after the programme started. The method employed was analogous to that used before the start of the programme in 1981. For this purpose, a representative sample of mothers who were attending child care services open to all income groups were interviewed, together with a number of health professionals. A total of 497 mothers with children aged 0-12 months were covered. A recall interview was also administered on the duration of breast-feeding for all children born to the mothers since 1981. As a result of the programme, the mean duration of breast-feeding rose from 89.4 days to 127.5 days and of feeding only breast-milk from 43.2 days to 66.6 days. The proportion of previous children who were breast-fed for more than 6 months rose from 18.9% for those born in 1981-82 to 37.7% for those born in 1984, when the programme activities were at their highest, and slipped back again to 27.6% in 1985-86.