Nestle are selling this product in Laos.
What do you think it is?
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Edited 23 Dec 08: Ding ding ding Arctic Firefox. It’s the label from Bear Brand coffee creamer. The first listed ingredient is sugar, with some milk solids and palm oil. It has less than half of the protein needed to sustain a baby, and about half the fat required. The company uses the same logo on infant formula and canned cow’s milk.
INFACT Canada has been making a noise about this since at least 2006, with no action from Nestle:
Dr. Leila Srour, one of INFACT Canada’s colleagues in the region, has reported visiting a village in the Southeast Asian country and finding a mother there gravely ill. In an email to INFACT, Dr. Srour related:
“Sadly, she died of unknown cause, perhaps tuberculosis. The couple have eight children, including a 5 month old…(Relatives) were giving a supplement by bottle. They brought me…a can, embossed with Nestle…The community development person assured me that these cans have “the picture”, so they knew that this milk is for babies.” […]
The label bears a message asserting that “Sweetened Beverage Creamer is not to be used as a breast milk substitute,” but as 39% of Laotian women are unable to read, this is hardly an adequate measure to prevent misuse. Furthermore, the warning is written in Lao, English, and Thai, but many people in rural Laos do not speak any of these languages.
The British Medical Journal this year published a paper on the problem, “Misperceptions and misuse of Bear Brand coffee creamer as infant food: national cross sectional survey of consumers and paediatricians in Laos“* They went to 84 villages, and spoke with 26 paediatricians and 1098 adult householders.
92% of the paediatricians said that parents “often” or “sometimes” fed this product to infants as a substitute for breast milk, half of them saying “often”, with it being used when mothers had gone out to work or had become ill or died. The product was widely believed to be suitable for infants:
Of 1098 adults surveyed, 96% believed that the can contains milk; 46% believed the Bear Brand logo indicates that the product is formulated for feeding to infants or to replace breast milk; 80% had not read the written warning on the can; and over 18% reported giving the product to their infant at a mean age of 4.7 months
Feeding coffee creamer to babies or small children can result in growth failure, kwashiorkor, brain damage, and death.
~
* Hubert Barennes et al, BMJ 2008;337:a1379, doi:10.1136/bmj.a1379
Categories: gender & feminism, health
Pamela Denoon Lecture 2016: Nelly Thomas 
Today in ‘You can’t make this sh*t up’ because no one would believe you’ 
Today in someone is wrong on the internet 
DUFC #69 
Hoyden About Town 
Preserved fish and seal meat for the polar bears in Laotian zoos.
Bear milk, clearly.
Kirsten’s last blog post..Muddled thoughts on privilege and prejudice.
Duh, infant formula. For bears.
‘New’? ‘Improved’? Yeah well that wouldn’t be hard.
Guh.
Well, this certainly makes it easier to resist the deliciousness of Milo…
Fortified energy drink to assist polar bears to escape melting ice sheets?
What, you mean Nestle didn’t draw any lessons from the infant-formula scandal? Surprise!
No one has it right so far. Here’s a clue: it’s not an infant formula of any kind.
Condensed milk?
Sterilization stuff for bottles?? I can’t think of what else Nestle makes…Quik?
I don’t know what it is, but those bears sure look happy! I think it must be the added vitamins!
It’s not one of those brain boosting kiddy formulas they’re now pushing? or dummies filled with formula?
Oh. How could they. Is Nestle run by psychos?
Nappies?
Okay, serious guess this time. It’d have to be some kind of milk product, and the logo implies that it can be given to babies. So, it’s then something probably NOT suitable as a substitute for breastfeeding (surprise, surprise).
Condensed milk has already been guessed, so maybe what the Dutch know as “coffeemilk”? It’s milk that is made specifically for coffee (no idea what kind of crap they put in it). Bit of a long shot since I don’t know the levels of coffee consumption in Laos, but I can’t think of anything else Nestle would make that could be accidentally fed to babies.
what’s up with the bear straddling that “o” type thing? it’s all very “open”
Ding ding ding Arctic Firefox. It’s coffee creamer. I’ve updated the post with more information.
Strawberry-flavored powdered milk targeted at toddlers and young children?
My only response to this is to curse a blue streak, so I’ll spare you.
I thought it was infant formula too. BTW: I hear in the US, some have been watering down their formula to stretch it. This is a bad idea, I believe.
I hate to attribute malice to people who are merely greedy and/ or stupid, but Nestle is evil. They actually cause the death of children through something that is so easily fixable.
hellonhairylegs’s last blog post..Sometimes all you can do is laugh.
Inner tubes for polar bears, to replace the melting ice floes. How they infuse the vitamins for ursine health is not certain.
That’s it, coffee creamer – I haven’t seen much of it here so I forget the English name. I used to stock the shelves with the stuff when I worked a few evenings in a supermarket in the Netherlands. The Dutch drink an enormous amount. No, really – enormous.
But really, when are corporations going to stop pulling all this shit, especially on low-income countries like Laos? It’s the most bombed nation on earth; much of the population already lives in abject poverty – many earn a (very dangerous) living by collecting the casings of bombs and bullets for recycling; 15% of their land has been sold to multinationals who grow food crops for other countries. And when the people of Laos actually have some money to spend, fuckwit companies like Nestle trick them into buying the wrong products.
It happens all over the world, wherever there are poor people. In the US, poorer women are often given formula through the WIC programme (breastfeeding is encouraged or discouraged to greater or lesser extents depending on the individual programme) – but from what I hear, it’s not quite enough formula to get them all the way through the month. You can imagine the rest.
That’s even more disgusting than usual. I second HoHL – nestle give the impression that they will never give a crap, no matter how many people die.