So what are the breastfeeding rates in the rest of Europe/the world?

[HolidaysQueen]

I keep reading that bf rates in the UK are some of the lowest in the industrialised world. I'm interested to see how much worse they are than other countries but when I google, I just seem to get that statement without any other data, or info on just a couple of countries.

Does anyone have a link to the data where this statement comes from?

(Sorry, I'm a bit of a numbers geek, so interested just to have a look!)

Where have you been googling, HQ? The info is on the Baby Friendly UK site somewhere, IIRC.

Try searching on breastfeeding statistics Europe.

The link was broken on the baby friendly site - I thought I'd nearly found it!

Will try again - my googling skills aren't as good as my numbers geekiness skills

www.kellymom.net/writings/bf-numbers.html

Kellymom - of course - has a page on it

You can access WHO statistics here. There is also a useful research paper by Yngve & Sjostrom on breastfeeding statistics in Europe - I haven't managed to find a free link unfortunately. Basically it notes that a lot of countries (eg France, Germany, Denmark) don't collate statistics in a co-ordinated way, and the ones that do don't always use the same definitions of breastfeeding/exclusive breastfeeding so aren't directly comparable. It also comments at length on the differences between UK and Sweden, mostly because the five-yearly infant feeding survey data collected in the UK is recognised as good data, as is that collected in Sweden. You can draw your own conclusions on why many national governments don't bother to collate the information.

The most-used US figures are the ones collected by Ross, which is a major formula company.

www.kellymom.net/writings/ross-data.html

These are the Ross stats.