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© Andrea Bussotti |
To maintain health and growth, young children need 40 essential nutrients. Those who do not get them become malnourished, a condition that contributes to more than five million deaths in children under five each year.
The World Health Organisation estimates there are 178 million malnourished children worldwide, all of whom are less able to fend off disease and 20 million of whom are at risk of death.
The critical age is between six and 24 months. At six months, mothers usually start supplementing breast milk with other foods. Yet, in ‘malnutrition hotspots’, such as Africa’s Horn and Sahel regions and South Asia, adequate food is either too expensive or simply not available.
Ensuring a complete balanced diet for children is a significant challenge that requires an urgent response.
Malnutrition is often lost in discussions around the subject of hunger, especially in the context of the discourse to “end world hunger,” or to “feed the world.” These blurred definitions help perpetuate the inadequate response to malnutrition. Malnutrition however requires responses that go beyond food aid.
Hunger is usually taken to mean a deficiency in caloric intake – any person whose daily diet gives fewer than the defined minimum of 2,100 kcal is considered suffering from hunger, or undernourished. The typical response to hunger is food aid that supplements a person’s daily caloric intake.
Malnutrition however is not merely the result of too little food. It is a pathology caused principally by a lack of essential nutrients. Most food aid is an inadequate response to malnutrition as it either delivers insufficient amounts of essential nutrients or delivers them in a way that they are destroyed by cooking or not taken up properly by the body.
Read more about why quality not quantity of food is critical for growing children
Why do children become malnourished?
Children become malnourished when they do not receive the adequate nutrients their bodies require to resist infection and maintain growth. When nutritional deficiencies become too significant, a child will begin to 'waste' – to consume his/her own tissues to obtain needed nutrients. Wasting is a sign of acute malnutrition. Read more about the nutritional needs of growing children
Who is most at risk?
Malnutrition affects first and foremost children under the age of two, but young children less than five years of age, adolescents, pregnant or lactating mothers, the elderly and the chronically ill (including those with HIV/AIDS and TB) are also vulnerable. Children are especially susceptible to growth failure when foods have to be introduced to complement breastfeeding in the first and second years of life. Wasting and other forms of acute malnutrition often appear among children in seasonal cycles, especially during the ‘hunger gap’ period between harvests.
“When children suffer from acute malnutrition, their immune systems are so impaired that the risks of mortality are greatly increased. A banal children’s disease such as a respiratory infection or gastro-enteritis can very quickly led to complications in a malnourished child and the risks of death are high.” Dr. Susan Shepherd, MSF Medical Coordinator for the nutritional programme in Maradi, Niger
Read more
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