Definition
For women who gave birth in the last three to five years, NBFEDNO_ALL (M55Z_x) indicates whether the child was given nothing (i.e., no supplemental fluids) to drink in the first three days after the birth. Some children may have been fed the mother's colostrum, a nourishing milky fluid that comes from the breast before true milk appears.
NBFEDNO_ALL consists of a set of six separate variables, covering the most recent birth (NBFEDNO_01) up to the sixth-most-recent birth (i.e., NBFEDNO_02, NBFEDNO_03, NBFEDNO_04, NBFEDNO_05, and NBFEDNO_06) during the reference period prior to the survey. If NBFEDNO_ALL is included in a data extract, all these separate variables are included in a researcher's data file.
For surveys including this question, information for this variable was collected on all births, up to a maximum of six, in the reference period. In many cases, data were hypothetically collected on up to six births, but no women in the survey had so many births (e.g., no woman had 4 or more births in 3 years, or had 5 or 6 births in 5 years). If, for example, no woman in a survey had 6 births in five years and only blank values were included in the original DHS file, then NBFEDNO_06 would not be available for that survey in IPUMS-DHS.
As documented in the Comparability section, many surveys collected this information for the last-born child only (NBFEDNO_01).
