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IWS Documented News Service
_______________________________
Institute for Workplace Studies                 Professor Samuel B. Bacharach
School of Industrial & Labor Relations          Director, Institute for Workplace Studies
Cornell University
16 East 34th Street, 4th floor                  Stuart Basefsky
New York, NY 10016                      Director, IWS News Bureau
________________________________________________________________________

The Food Research and Action Center

WIC in the States: Thirty-One Years of Building a Healthier America [22 April 2005]
http://www.frac.org/WIC/2004_Report/index.html
or
http://www.frac.org/WIC/2004_Report/Full_Report.pdf
[full-text, 185 pages]

[excerpt]
Introduction
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children
(WIC) is 31 years old in 2005. This report reviews WIC’s achievements in its 31
year history and its importance to women, infants and children, and documents the
growth in WIC participation nationally and in each state.
The creation of WIC was one response to the realization that hunger and poverty
were widespread in this country and that inadequate nutrition poses real dangers
to pregnant women, new mothers, infants and children. Congress created WIC as
a preventive program, providing low-income pregnant women, new mothers,
infants and children with nutritious foods, nutrition education, and improved access
to health care in order to prevent nutrition-related health problems in pregnancy,
infancy and early childhood.

In 1974, the first WIC clinic opened in Pineville, Kentucky. The first participant
certified there was a young child named Robert Martin Holland. WIC had been
authorized as a pilot program in 1972, but didn’t open its doors until two years later.
Vermont implemented the first statewide WIC program in 1974. Thirty-one years
later, an average of 8 million women, infants and children are participating in WIC
each month. WIC now serves almost half of all infants and one-quarter of all
children 1 to 5 years of age in the United States.

Growth alone is not, of course, cause for celebration. What is cause for celebration
is WIC’s extraordinary record of accomplishments for the nutrition and health of the
nation’s children, and that record has grown as the program has grown.
Just a few of the many positive findings about WIC in its 31 years highlight its
contributions to saving children’s lives, to improving maternal and child health, and
to establishing benchmarks for the ways in which wise investments can improve
both the nation’s health and its economic strength.

• U.S. Department of Agriculture studies have shown that WIC saves lives. For
example, WIC dramatically lowers infant mortality, by approximately onequarter
to two-thirds, among the Medicaid beneficiaries who participate in
WIC, compared to Medicaid beneficiaries who do not participate in WIC.1
USDA has estimated that 113,000 children and young adults are alive today
who would have died without WIC intervention.2 WIC’s greatest effect in
lowering infant mortality has been in the reduction in neonatal mortality -- the
death rate for infants during the first 28 days after birth.

• University of California and Rand Corporation researchers recently
confirmed once again what USDA and other studies have shown, that WIC
participation is associated with improved birth outcomes: WIC reduces the
probability that an infant is low birth weight by 29 percent, and very low birth
weight by more than half.3 Researchers citied WIC’s positive impact in
reducing the heartbreak, struggle and social costs related to infant mortality
and infants being born with permanent disabilities. Tragically, low birth
weight increases the risk of death, and is associated with a range of
negative outcomes for surviving infants including lower earnings, education
and employment rates as adults.

• The Institute for Research on Poverty recently published an analysis
showing that WIC is successfully preventing overweight in young children,
which is likely to have implications for their future risk of contracting obesityrelated
diseases.4 The researchers concluded that this is an important
measure of the success of the WIC program because of the importance of
obesity as a public health threat, and because of the importance of
establishing healthy eating habits early in life.

• The Children’s Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program has recently
confirmed once again that WIC benefits are associated with improved infant
health and growth: protecting against infant underweight and undernutrition.5
Researchers estimate that each year WIC plays a key role in preventing
underweight among at least 75,000 infants less than one year of age.
Gains like these have been hard won. They are the victory of WIC workers,
nutritionists, doctors, nurses, and paraprofessionals in thousands of clinics in
hundreds of communities; of hundreds of advocates in Washington and the states
who have fought for 31 years to nurture the program and help it to succeed and
grow; and of the members of Congress from both


_____________________________
This information is provided to subscribers, friends, faculty, students and alumni of the School of Industrial & Labor Relations (ILR). It is a service of the Institute for Workplace Studies (IWS) in New York City. Stuart Basefsky is responsible for the selection of the contents which is intended to keep researchers, companies, workers, and governments aware of the latest information related to ILR disciplines as it becomes available for the purposes of research, understanding and debate. The content does not reflect the opinions or positions of Cornell University, the School of Industrial & Labor Relations, or that of Mr. Basefsky and should not be construed as such. The service is unique in that it provides the original source documentation, via links, behind the news and research of the day. Use of the information provided is unrestricted. However, it is requested that users acknowledge that the information was found via the IWS Documented News Service.

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Stuart Basefsky                 *
Director, IWS News Bureau               *
Institute for Workplace Studies *
Cornell/ILR School                      *
16 E. 34th Street, 4th Floor            *
New York, NY 10016                      *
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Telephone: (607) 255-2703               *
Fax: (607) 255-9641                     *
E-mail: smb6@cornell.edu                *
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# posted by SBasefsky : 1:46 PM