Nutritional Anemia During Infancy

To the Editor.—  Drs Berg and van Pelt (240:1362, 1978) have made an important observation: children receiving any of a variety of iron-supplemented foods in the first year of life are unlikely to have development of iron deficiency anemia. Readers should contrast their logical and simple method for providing ironfortified foods with the cumbersome and inefficient methods required by most federally funded programs. Every family was given an opportunity to obtain iron-fortified infant foods. In federal programs there is a constant nit-picking over eligibility on the (false) assumption that a child from one poor family is less eligible than a child from another family with a few extra dollars of yearly income. When nutrition problems are resolved, support is often withdrawn.I believe that their conclusions are biased by the nature of the population surveyed. A study of families willing to attend clinic is inherently biased. Families of clinic attenders