Europa Newswire
November 11, 2009
By Amy Lieberman
Largely preventable illnesses, like diarrhoea and pneumonia, accounted for 8.8 million deaths of children under the age of five in 2008 – global malnutrition was responsible for more than one-third of those deaths, according to UNICEF.
Yet sheer awareness and governments’ attention to the devastating trend have helped buck high malnutrition, and child mortality, rates in recent years, according to Ann Veneman, executive director of UNCIEF.
Ninety-seven percent of children in Madagascar, for example, received their required doses of vitamin A in 2008 – a drastic increase from 38 percent of children, aged six-months to 5-years, who met their vitamin A needs in 2000.
UNICEF highlights 23 other nations’ progress and setbacks its latest report, “Tracking Progress on Child and Maternal Nutrition,” released today. While addressing the intrinsic links between maternal and children’s health, as well as the impact the present food crisis has had on struggling families in developing nations, the report also shows “that solutions do exist,” Veneman said in a conference call.
Solutions often become within reach, she told Europa Newswire, when nations most affected by malnutrition rates actively work to provide their children and mothers with proper nutrients; mandating the presence of iodized salt in commercial products, for example, can be “critical to cognitive development” and all-around health.
An increasing onset with of public partnerships with the private sector have also enabled UNICEF and governments alike to readily provide more people with access to nutrients, Veneman explained.
“One of the things we have seen in the last five or six years is an increase of what we call, ‘ready-to-use therapeutic foods, produced by private sector companies and purchased by UNICEF and other organizations also,” she said to Europa Newswire. “This is a treatment that can basically be used to treat acute malnutrition without having children go to the hospital. Health care costs are then cut down, and it’s a relatively new treatment, one that has been scaled up quite a bit.”
UNICEF purchased about 11,000 metric tons of this food in 2008 – in 2003, the organization bought only 100 metric tons of it.
Initiatives like these have helped bring partners together with governments, as well; in 2007, Ethiopia launched its first plant to manufacture ready-to-use food itself, pairing with a private French company that provided it with the formula.
“It really shows how collaborations
like this have been very effective, and hopefully will continue to be,
as well,” Veneman concluded.
Photo by: Raymond Yu/Europa Newswire
