The cause was pneumonia, his son Mark said.
Dr. Latham, who directed the Program in International Nutrition at Cornell University for 25 years, first encountered the problems of nutrition in the developing world while practicing medicine as a young doctor for the British colonial service in Tanganyika (now Tanzania).
After the country had gained its independence, he stayed on and was appointed the director of the nutrition unit of the public health ministry. He became alarmed at efforts by Western companies to expand their marketing of infant formula to underdeveloped countries, where high birth rates promised a growing consumer base, and he became one of the first and most forceful public health scientists to sound a warning.
In many poor countries, he pointed out, mothers mixed powdered baby formula with contaminated water, leading to diarrheal diseases. To make the formula last longer, they often used too little of the powder, depriving their babies of vital nutrients.
Bottle feeding was “incredibly difficult and extremely bad,” Dr. Latham wrote in a 1976 report with Ted Greiner, but “the media onslaught is terrific, the messages are powerful and the profits are high.”
“High also is the resultant human suffering,” they wrote.
Dr. Latham’s cause, taken up by several health groups, led the World Health Organization in 1981 to develop a set of guidelines, the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes, which was intended to govern the behavior of private companies. He was a prominent figure in the boycott of Nestlé, a leading manufacturer of infant formula, which agreed in 1984 to abide by the marketing code.
The ideal food for infants, Dr. Latham argued, was breast milk. Its benefits, he wrote, were not limited to improved physical and mental development. It could also potentially curb population growth, he argued, since parents who were confident that their children would thrive would be more likely to have smaller families. In 1991, he helped found the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action to explain and promote the benefits of breastfeeding around the world.
Michael Charles Latham was born on May 6, 1928, in Kilosa, Tanganyika, where his father was a doctor in the British colonial service. After earning a medical degree from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1952, he worked in hospitals in Britain and the United States before returning to Tanganyika to practice medicine in rural areas. During intermittent leaves, he earned a diploma in tropical public health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1958.
After leaving Tanzania in 1964, he taught nutrition at Harvard, where he received a degree in public health in 1965. In 1968 he was recruited by Cornell as a professor of international nutrition. He turned the university’s small Program in International Nutrition into one of the world’s largest training centers for nutritionists, many of whom went on to work in international agencies and public health departments around the world.
His research led to improved programs on infant nutrition, the control of parasitic diseases in humans, and the supply of micronutrients to poor populations.
Dr. Latham often did consulting work in Africa, Asia and South America for organizations like the World Health Organization, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Unicef and the World Bank.
In addition to his son Mark, of Somerville, Mass., he is survived by his second wife, Dr. Lani Stephenson, and another son, Miles, of Trumansburg, N.Y.
He was the author of two important books on international nutrition, “Human Nutrition in Tropical Africa” (1965) and “Human Nutrition in the Developing World” (1997), as well as a family memoir, “Kilimanjaro Tales: The Saga of a Medical Family in Africa” (1995), which drew on the journals kept by his mother, Gwynneth Latham.
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