Surveying the knowledge, attitude and performance of lactating women of Yazd city about heavy metals transmitted from breast milk

Breast milk can act as a route excretion of heavy metals from mother to baby and children is ex-tremely vulnerable against poisoning with these substances. The aim of this study was to assess the knowledge, attitude and performance of lactating women referred to health centers of Yazd about heavy metals transmitted from breast milk in 2016.
This study was a descriptive cross - sectional in which among lactating women referred to health cen-ters of Yazd city, 150 people were selected by cluster sampling. Data collection was done by a questionnaire that contain questions about knowledge, attitude and performance of lactating women about heavy metals transmitted from breast milk. Finally, the data were analyzed by SPSS software and Mann - Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests.
lactating women referred to health centers have gained 60.58%, 51.20% and 46.28% of the maximum score of knowledge, attitude and performance, respectively. The results showed that the mean score of perfor-mance in lactating women less than 30 year-olds longer than women older than 30 year-olds (P value=0.048) and mean score of attitude employed lactating women were significantly higher than housekeeper lactating women (P value=0.049).
The results showed that the level of knowledge in lactating women was average and the levels of attitude and performance have been low. Therefore, the development of programs to raise awareness, attitude and performance of lactating women seems necessary.