A Pediatrician, Prof. James Renner, on Thursday, urged the Federal Government to make provision that would include babies of two years and below, and their mothers, in the National Home Grown School Feeding programme.
Renner of the Department of Pediatrics, Ben Carson School of Medicine, Babcock University, IIlishan-Remo, Ogun, made the call in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria in Lagos.
According to him, the first two years of life is where we should center our attention.
He said: “By the time the child is six years old, the amount of improvement or growth is very minimal.
“So if we are going to have a significant impact on brain growth, for cognition purposes, then it is before those six years; two years is the maximum that a child has the highest brain development.
“We commend and acknowledge government for what it is doing, but we must focus on the first two years of life of babies.’’
He said that by the time the child was six, “what we call the arborisation and myelination had gone to the base’’.
The pediatrician also told NAN that at two, the brain of a child had developed to about 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the adult size, saying that after two, it was not possible to add more to the brain size.
He advised government to engage the services of experts who would provide proper advice on how to go about the feeding programme.
The expert recalled that at one stage in the United States, there was a Multi Maternal Infant Feeding programme for the vulnerable and families who were unable to feed.
He said the beneficiaries were given tickets to go to centres where they could get food for, especially the mothers and their babies.
Renner said although the US had gone past the stage now, Nigeria could still experiment same.
The pediatrician urged government to channel the money in the proper way, adding that there were competent experts who would guide government on how to include this group of persons in the programme.
NAN reports that the in 2016, HGSF programme was launched by the Buhari administration as part of a N500 billion funded Social Investment Programme.
The aim of the programme was to tackle poverty and improve the health and education of children as well as other vulnerable groups.
The Federal Government had in the last two years spent N49 billion to feed about 8.596 pupils in 46,247 public primary schools in 24 states of the federation.
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