[meindnoch]

Yeah, and their infant mortality is on par with Sub-Saharan Africa.

"The second most common prelacteal feed is honey, a delicious natural sweetener. Numerous studies [29,30] have shown that the ingestion of honey under one year of age is linked with infant botulism, a disease that results in a blockade of voluntary motor and autonomic functions. Apart from this, other prelacteal feeds get contaminated due to unhygienic environment, especially in rural India and in urban slums, resulting in infantile diarrhea. Thus, a wide range of prelacteal feeds and the introduction of early supplements result in recurrent diarrhea with multiple illness finally ending lives because of inaccessibility and unaffordibility of treatment and delayed or inappropriate care seeking behavior."

Rohini Ghosh - Child mortality in India: a complex situation (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12519-012-0331-y)

The paper lists a bunch of other traditional practices that have deleterious effects on the infants' health, such as putting unsanitary herbal concoctions on the babies navel while it's still healing, etc.

[jodrellblank]

> result in recurrent diarrhea

This mind-blowing statistic stays in my head:

"Diarrhoea is a leading killer of children, accounting for approximately 9 per cent of all deaths among children under age 5 worldwide in 2021. This translates to over 1,200 young children dying each day" - https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/diarrhoeal-diseas...

Almost one per minute.