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	news bulletins july 2001

• ProMoM Announces National Nurse Out
• Marketers Spying on School Kids without Parental Consent
• World Breastfeeding Week to Focus on Information Age
• AMA Takes Action on Antibiotics in Agriculture

ProMoM Announces National Nurse Out
A mother nursing her child in public may currently be a rare sight, but if ProMoM (Promotion of Mother's Milk Inc.), a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing public awareness and public acceptance of breastfeeding, has its way you may see a woman breastfeeding on every corner.

During World Breastfeeding Week, August 1-7, ProMoM will sponsor a "National Nurse Out" to encourage and mobilize more women to feel comfortable breastfeeding their children in public.

According to Katherine Dettwyler, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Nutrition at Texas A&M University, "Women shouldn't have to choose between breastfeeding and having a life. They should be able to go anywhere and do anything, with their baby in tow, and they should be able to breastfeed their baby whenever and wherever they happen to be whent he baby needs to be fed."

However, according to Regina Roig-Lane, BS, and Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) "fear of nursing in public is a main reason women choose not to breastfeed." Sarah Munoz, Executive Director of ProMoM notes: "The sight of a nursing mother is too unusual. We're hoping to make it commonplace; at least during this week, and help mothers feel more comfortable feeding their babies in public. The more people see it, the less conspicuous it becomes."

For more information, visit promom.org/events/nno2001 with information about the nurse out, tips on breastfeeding in public, and information that participants can print and distribute. The ProMoM website also offers a discussion board where mothers can organize their local Nurse Outs, and promote the national event locally.

Marketers Spying on School Kids without Parental Consent
The corporation NetworkNext uses high schools to gather market research from teenagers, and to pitch products to them, without parental consent.

The company boasts to advertisers of an "audience of one million teens in 1,000 schools," and the ability to "test the impact of changes in online interactive marketing variables" on high school students which "puts business and marketing decision information at your fingertips." With its mobile computer and projection equipment that it provides to schools, the company says it displays banner ads in classrooms "continuously...for the entire class to view."

"NetworkNext wants to turn the schools into billboards, shopping malls and market research extractors," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a group that opposes commercialism.

The company, which says it is "in the e-commerce and Internet advertising business," tells advertisers that they can receive "Total online purchase behavior of teens," including the ability to "track the dynamics of online consumer purchasing" by students. It boasts of a "unique viewing environment" ­-the schools-­"that helps sponsors increase awareness, usage and purchase intent." The company also features an iCanCharge.com debit card. "It is not the proper role of the schools to promote charge cards and materialism to impressionable teenagers," Ruskin said.

According to a recent article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the company plans its "national rollout" in September.

NetworkNext is following a string of failed high-tech strategies for commercial exploitation of schoolchildren. Commercial Alert, Obligation Inc. and Junkbusters ran a campaign that helped lead to the demise of the ZapMe! Corp., a similar company that advertised and gathered market research from schoolchildren. Similar public outrage forced another company, N2H2 Inc., to announce that it would stop gathering market research from schoolchildren. A third company, HiFusion, stopped collecting market research from schoolchildren and was purchased by Mindsurf.

On June 14th, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved the "Student Privacy Protection Act," sponsored by Senators Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Christopher Dodd (D-CT), that would require parental consent before a company could extract market research from a child in school. The measure is pending in a House-Senate conference committee.

NetworkNext says it has "participating schools" in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, and Washington DC.

For more information, visit Commercial Alert's website at www.commercialalert.org.

World Breastfeeding Week to Focus on Information Age
World Breastfeeding Week begins August 1st,and will focus its celebration on the ways women in the current Information Age communicate information on breastfeeding.

While many know breastmilk is best for babies, they still can have difficulty receiving support and help with their nursing relationship. Organized by the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action, World Breastfeeding Week aims to promote the importance of transforming and conveying the facts of breastfeeding via all the available forms of communication such as the internet, radio, TV, video, and newspapers.

The internet is one effective way for mothers to find a supportive nursing community, even if they live in rural Kentucky or New York City, notes Dana Anagnostou, founder of ProMoM (Promotion of Mother's Milk Inc.), a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing public awareness and public acceptance of breastfeeding. At the ProMoM site, mothers and their families log on and use features like "101 Reasons to Breastfeed", "Nursing and Working", and "Nursing Beyond the First Year".

For more information, visit the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action or www.promom.org.

AMA Takes Action on Antibiotics in Agriculture

At its annual June meeting in Chicago, the American Medical Association (AMA) endorsed a resolution opposing the unnecessary use of antibiotics to speed the growth of healthy farm animals and urging that all such agricultural use of antibiotics be terminated or phased out.

While overuse of antibiotics in humans is regarded as an important cause of the decreasing effectiveness of antibiotics, the AMA's resolution specifically acknowledges the role of animal agriculture in this public health crisis. "About 70% of all antibiotics are used--not to treat sick animals--but to artificially boost weight gain in healthy poultry, hogs, fish, and beef cattle, and to compensate for unsanitary growing conditions, especially on crowded "factory" farms," said Jane Rissler, Ph.D., Senior Scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that supports the AMA action.

The more often bacteria are exposed to an antibiotic, the more chances they have to develop resistance against it. When animals are given antibiotics to artificially boost weight gain and compensate for poor growing conditions, they are given low doses that kill only the most susceptible bacteria and leave the surviving bacteria to pass on their resistant features to succeeding generations.

The AMA resolution specifically opposes "the use of antimicrobials at less than therapeutic levels in agriculture, or as pesticides or growth promoters, and urges that these uses be phased out by regulation."

For more information, see the AMA Resoution at www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/4940.html. Look for resolution 508.