Malnutrition

Here is how we can eradicate Hunger & Malnutrition from the World!

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• published: 08 Apr 2015
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As world leaders have been occupied with one economic crisis after another, a hunger and malnutrition crisis affecting millions of children has gone unchecked. While the world has been experiencing years of financial turmoil, pervasive long-term malnutrition is slowly eroding the foundations of the global economy by destroying the potential of millions of children. A hidden malnutrition crisis is affecting one third of children in the developing world, impairing their development and leaving them vulnerable to deadly disease. Malnutrition is more than hunger, but malnourished children are often painfully hungry. Causes of malnutrition include disease, poverty and food shortages. This crisis is not new. Progress on reducing malnutrition has been pitifully slow for 20 years. But a combination of global trends – climate change, volatile food prices,economic uncertainty and demographic shifts – is putting future progress on tackling malnutrition at risk.Action must be taken now to prevent the crisis deteriorating and more children suffering the life-long consequences. By mid-2013, it will already be too late to make a difference to the last generation of children who will reach their second birthday –a crucial nutrition milestone – by 2015. That’s the deadline for the eight Millennium Development Goals, six of which are dependent in part on tackling malnutrition.Every hour of every day, 300 children die because of malnutrition. It’s an underlying cause of more than a third of children’s deaths – 2.6 million every year. But it’s not recorded on death certificates and, as a result, it’s not effectively addressed.Even for those children who survive, long-term malnutrition causes devastating and irreversible damage. Lack of nutritious food, coupled with infection and illness, means their bodies and brains don’t develop properly. At least 170 million children are affected by stunting.This means that not only are they too short for their age – they’re also likely to enrol at school later and to do less well academically. For example, iodine deficiency, a type of malnutrition caused by a lack of specific nutrients, affects one-third of schoolchildren in developing countries and is associated with a loss of 10–15 IQ points. Childhood malnutrition can lessen productivity – stunted children are predicted to earn an average of 20% less when they become adults.If current trends continue, the lives of more than 450 million children globally will be affected by stunting in the next 15 years. SIX KEY STEPS TO TACKLING MALNUTRITION We’re calling for national and international action on six key steps to tackle the global malnutrition crisis head on: 1. Make malnutrition visible: Chronic malnutrition is a hidden killer that kills slowly and doesn’t appear on death certificates. In order to make the deaths of these children count and to make governments accountable for preventing them. 2. Invest in direct interventions: The cost of scaling up the ‘Lancet package’ of 13 interventions, including fortification, is $10–12bn a year. 3. Fill the health worker gap: There is a critical shortage of at least 3.5 million doctors, nurses, midwives and community health workers, who are vital in delivering the direct interventions that can improve nutrition. 4. Protect families from poverty: Many of the best examples of progress in tackling malnutrition have come from countries that have invested in effective social protection policies that reach vulnerable families. 5. Harness agriculture to help tackle malnutrition: Governments must support small-scale farmers and female farmers, and ensure that making a positive impact on nutrition is an explicit objective of agriculture policies,by focusing on projects that are designed to improve children’s diet – for example, home gardening or education projects that focus on nutrition. 6. Galvanise political leadership: Raising the profile of malnutrition requires a build-up of political momentum to galvanise change. The US G8 and the Mexican G20 in 2012, and the UK G8 in 2013 all offer major opportunities for progress, as food, nutrition and social protection are likely to be on the agenda. These countries should work together to ensure an ambitious action plan that aligns institutional reform with clear delivery of new resources. With the support of the international community, countries with high malnutrition burdens should exhibit the leadership and commitment needed to eliminate malnutrition This video was originally published here: https://vimeo.com/tibbo For more information visit: http://www.savethechildren.org/site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.7980641/k.C98/Nutrition_Report_2012.htm