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Infants up to one year old are WIC’s priority
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Posted on Apr 28 2008
The CNMI Department of Public Health Women, Infants, and Children program have placed infants up to one year of age on their priority list due in big part to the large number of people on the program’s waiting list.
The United States Department of Agriculture’s Food & Nutrition website states that the program is intended to cater to the health needs of low-income women, infants and children up to five years of age.
According to WIC nutritionist Erin Angela Camacho, currently those on the priority list are pregnant women, infants up to one year of age and breastfeeding mothers of those infants.
Camacho explained that “when the western region came in to do our audit [recently], we had such a large waiting list that we had to come up with a priority list.”
However, she said WIC is still taking in the names of those children up to the age of five, but cannot say for sure when the program will get to them.
“The priority list gives us a direction on who those priorities are,” Camacho said.
There are 1,200 families on the CNMI WIC waiting list.
According to Camacho, it took WIC about five months to go through the first waiting list since the program opened.
WIC apologizes if the program has caused any inconvenience to anyone who has been placed on its waiting for a considerably long time.
With the growing number of pregnant women in the CNMI, non-pregnant women and children are being bumped down the waiting list.
WIC provides Federal grants to States for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children who are found to be at nutritional risk.
