By Deborah A. Frank, MD
Director, Grow Clinic for Children, Boston Medical Center
Founding Principal Investigator, Children’s HealthWatch
Professor of Pediatrics, Boston University School of Medicine

Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba, MPH
Research and Policy Director, Children’s HealthWatch

In 1967 in his role as senator from New York, Bobby Kennedy visited the American South to see firsthand children suffering from severe malnutrition due to poverty. This trip and the CBS documentary “Hunger in America” helped finally bring the issue of hunger to the attention of the nation. 

  

 In 1968, a group of physicians met with government officials and told them of the young women, often pregnant, who came to their clinics suffering a variety problems related to malnutrition. Their solution was to create food commissaries connected to neighborhood clinics, where women would obtain food packages by prescription. In 1974, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) as we know it began.  

WIC is a now national success story – a food prescription program with extensive scientific evidence of its effectiveness in supporting the health of pregnant women, nursing mothers and young children in the critical period of brain growth.  

One Minneapolis mother explained that WIC kept her healthy during pregnancy:  

“WIC helped me a lot because they used to give me a lot of fruits and vegetables. … I think I was healthy. That was one of the reasons why I was so healthy. … But I was able to eat all these fruits and vegetables and drink milk and the peanut butter and the protein… So that helped a lot. I think WIC is awesome.”  

To participate, households must meet income eligibility criteria and state residency requirements and be determined to be at “nutritional risk” by a health professional. WIC participants receive monthly vouchers to purchase foods high in the essential nutrients often dangerously lacking in the diets of low-income families. In addition, WIC links women and children with health care by integrating its services with others that are necessary for children’s well-being. WIC’s public health workers, for example, screen all immunization records of infants and children under age two and provide referrals to immunization services and nutrition education.  

WIC Improves Child Health and Development  

There is a long history of research showing that WIC is good medicine for mothers and young children – medicine which spares the public purse by decreasing low birth weight, Failure to Thrive, and anemia, and increasing immunization rates. Recently, new research from Children’s HealthWatch, a pediatric research center collecting data in five U.S. cities, has shown that WIC also decreases very young children’s risk of developmental delays.  

Children’s HealthWatch has shown that:  

• WIC decreases the risk of developmental delays in young children. Young children are considered at risk for developmental delays when families note that their ability to speak and understand language, use small and large muscles, and regulate their social/emotional behavior is less than other children their age. By reducing the risk of early developmental delay, WIC helps children to be ready to learn when they enter school.
• Children under age three who receive WIC are more likely to be in good health than children who are eligible but do not receive WIC due to difficulties accessing the program. They are also more likely to be food secure and have a healthy height and weight for their age, neither over nor underweight.
• WIC has its most protective effect on children younger than 12 months old. It is during this period that young children’s brains more than double in size if the nutritional building blocks are provided.
• Although WIC is good medicine, only 57 percent of those eligible are enrolled. Women interviewed by Children’s HealthWatch reported a range of barriers to accessing the program, including lack of a permanent address, limited office hours at some WIC offices, and difficulty getting to the WIC office to pick up vouchers because of work or other responsibilities. As state budgets are cut back, the hours and staffing of WIC services dwindle despite increasing need. The challenges are particularly grave for impoverished rural and suburban families living where there is no public transportation and often no car.

Preventive Nutritional Care In Practice  

At Boston Medical Center (BMC) some of these access issues have been resolved by locating the WIC Office right in the hospital. Families referred to WIC by their physicians need only go down the hallway to talk to WIC nutritionists. In addition, the WIC office shares space with a very unique and innovative operation, the Preventive Food Pantry, the first hospital-based food pantry in the country, established because clinicians were so frustrated that their patients were suffering from serious illnesses due to an inability to afford a healthful diet. BMC’s food pantry is “preventive” in that it provides therapeutic diets to all family members and addresses disorders often linked to malnutrition and hunger in all age groups, like diabetes or hypertension in the elderly or growth failure in babies.  

Around the world, diets inadequate in quantity and quality are among the most treatable and most preventable threats to the health and learning potential of children and families. WIC represents a successful, uniquely American model for getting healthful nutrition to our mothers and children.  

About Children’s HealthWatch
Children’s HealthWatch monitors the impact of economic conditions and public policies on the health and well-being of young children. Our network of pediatricians and public health researchers collects data in hospital emergency rooms and primary care clinics in five research cities: Baltimore, Boston, Minneapolis, Little Rock and Philadelphia.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Campaign. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.