Baby clinics must resume full service to avoid health time bomb — health workers
Tipat Halav centers are essential for ensuring babies stay healthy and must reopen later this week, National Council for Community Health tells Health Ministry
Nathan Jeffay is The Times of Israel's health and science correspondent

Professionals from the front lines of community medicine have asked the government to urgently resume full service at Tipat Halav baby centers.
If the clinics do not reopen soon, “we’ll be left with kids with physical problems if they aren’t gaining weight or height, and we’ll have kids who are running behind with development,” said Amnon Lahad, chairman of the National Council for Community Health.
He told The Times of Israel that his organization, which advises the Health Ministry, had written to ministry officials warning them of a health time bomb if the baby clinics, which have canceled most appointments, do not become fully operational straight after Passover.
“Tipat Halav gives preventative services for newborns and slightly older kids, and it’s a critical age,” Lahad said. “Things that you treat there are hard to catch later. Immunizations are partially working and are highly important, but tracking weight gain and developmental things is also extremely important.
“You can miss them for a week or two but if it goes on for a long time children will not reach their milestones and that will be hard to catch later.”

Lahad, chairman of family medicine at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said: “After Passover, they should open. It’s not a problem because it’s separate places from areas for chronic care. The chances people will catch coronavirus from going to Tipat Halav is negligible.”
His council wants to see various other medical services resume. He commented: “Freezing everything is something you can do for a very, very short period of time.”
There is disagreement among doctors about how central shielding children from exposure to coronavirus is to the fight against COVID-19. Gabi Barabash, a former director-general of the Health Ministry, said last week that he sees schools as “infection repositories” and therefore they should only resume in stage five of a seven-stage exit strategy from the coronavirus crisis.
Lahad said: “I disagree with this,” arguing that even if children do catch the virus they would mostly only pass it to their parents and other children, society’s lowest-risk groups. “If there is a way toward herd immunity, this would be the way,” he said.
He said he believed that as many non-urgent medical services are on hold, the power of telemedicine to replace face-to-face consultations is being widely overstated. “We are too optimistic about it,” he said. “It’s a big advantage, you can do many things, but not everything. It is important, but people are too optimistic.”
Lahad said that the problem of baby care in the current crisis extends beyond Tipat Halav to doctor’s appointments, with parents keen to cancel appointments out of fear of catching the virus, even when check-ups are important.
“I had a child, 4-and-a-half months old, who needed follow-up on something from her ultrasound taken when in uterus — a non-severe form of heart disease,” he said. “They didn’t want to come. I had to tell them they needed to come, as I really needed to listen to the heart.”
Lahad’s warning follows concerns from other doctors regarding the knock-on effect of the crisis on children’s health. Anthony Luder, director of the Pediatric Department at Ziv Medical Center in Safed, has witnessed what he considers shocking cases of children’s lives being put in danger because parents are petrified to go to the hospital.
“We’re starting to see growing numbers of issues where children are sick, being kept at home, and then developing complications that are difficult to treat and dangerous to the child,” he told The Times of Israel earlier this month.