Overview on child health, nutrition and food hazards during the first thousand days of life

Author(s): Hamid Wilson*

The dangers of food during a child's first thousand days of life are covered in this article. The purpose is to bring decision-makers, healthcare officers, and professionals—including paediatricians, paediatric surgeons, obstetricians, nurses, midwives, dieticians, and lactation consultants—to the significance of safeguarding newborns and their families during a crucial time for the mother-child binomial. The conclusions emphasise the significance of promoting the adoption of integrated strategies, useful at setting up adequate preventive efforts and a paradigm shift to develop and adopt effective monitoring strategies and procedures, able to minimize the risks due to hazards in food throughout the first thousand days of life, as a first line of prevention in children's health. In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in global awareness of the concept of food safety, involving all parties involved in regulating and actively monitoring this issue at all levels. Parallel to this, consumer and advocacy organisations' expectations for governments, policymakers, business, researchers, and healthcare professionals to have a more active and interventionist role in this area of public health have developed. They want the decision-making parties to address food safety concerns and come up with sufficient answers and activities that will further safeguard the health of food consumers. The idea that food safety is not absolute and that it relates to a "reasonable certainty that no damage will arise from intended uses under the anticipated conditions of consumption" is currently well-established and widely accepted. According to this concept, it is realistically not possible to have zero tolerance for hazards in the majority of food contexts and safety contexts, including food chains.

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