Manila - About 160 000 infants die each year in the Asia-Pacific region due to a decline in breast-feeding, a UNICEF expert told a regional conference.
There are "roughly 160 000 children dying annually in eastern and south-eastern Asia whose deaths are attributed to something as preventable and as imminently correctable as sub-optimal breast-feeding," said UN children's agency (UNICEF) regional advisor Stephen Atwood.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) warned that babies less than five months old who were not exclusively breast-fed were at much higher risk of diarrhoea and pneumonia, which often prove deadly in developing countries.
The joint WHO and UNICEF conference to promote breast-feeding said just 35 percent of babies in the region were exclusively breast-fed in the first four months of their lives.
In a joint statement they said this was "an alarming threat to child survival," and called on countries in the region to invest more in promoting breast-feeding and to warn people of "the dangers of breast-milk substitutes".
WHO regional director Shigeru Omi warned that "breast-feeding rates declined in most developing countries in East Asia and the Pacific where just over one-third of mothers exclusively breast-feed their babies for up to six months."
He cited host country the Philippines as an example, where the rate of exclusive breast-feeding in the first five months fell from 20 percent in 1998 to 16 percent in 2003.
The rate of exclusive breast-feeding of babies six months old varied widely in the region with Thailand at 5,4 percent and North Korea at 65,1 percent, the WHO said in a statement.
The WHO said an increase in breastfeeding in Cambodia had contributed to a sharp fall in child mortality.
In 2000, just 11 percent of Cambodian mothers breast-fed their babies for the first six months. By 2005, 60 percent were breastfeeding which the WHO said contributed to a steep fall in child mortality rates over the same period.
Omi said governments should address the problem by ensuring their health systems promoted breast-feeding.
He also called for legislation to ban "the inappropriate promotion of breast-milk substitutes," especially those which say these products can increase the health and intelligence of children.
In the region, he noted only the Philippines and Palau had laws explicitly barring the promotion of infant formula as breast-milk substitutes for babies below the age of one.