Infant Feeding in Bolivia: A Critique of the World Health Organization Indicators Applied to Demographic and Health Survey Data

Infant feeding is a multidimensional activity that can be described and analysed in many different ways. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently issued recommended indicators for assessing infant feeding practices. This paper presents these indicators and demonstrates their applications using the 1989 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data for Bolivia. The results indicate that, although most Bolivian infants are breastfed and two-thirds are breastfed for >1 year, supplementary feeding practices deviate considerably from international recommendations. Only 58% of infants