Confusion on how to measure and even how to report
the duration of exclusive breastfeeding is still common,
even in the “breastfeeding community”. In the Action
Folder for the 20th World Breastfeeding Week in 2012 [4],
one finds the following wording: “less than 40% of babies
benefit from exclusive breastfeeding for six months”. Of
course this statement would be correct if anything less
than 40% did so, but globally it is likely that a very low
proportion of women continuously exclusively breastfeed
“for” six months. In the abstract of a paper in the WHO
Bulletin, we have the following: “. . . only 28.7% of infants
younger than 6 months had been exclusively breastfed”.
[5] Would one day have been adequate to be included in
this percentage?