Poor sanitation may afflict well-fed kids
He wore thick black eyeliner to ward off the evil eye, but Vivek, a tiny 1-year-old living in a village of mud huts and diminutive people, had nonetheless fallen victim to India’s great scourge of malnutrition. His parents seemed to be doing all the right things. His mother still breast-fed him. His family had six goats, access to fresh buffalo milk and a hut filled with hundreds of pounds of wheat and potatoes. His home state has for years grown faster than almost any other. His mother said she fed him as much as he would eat and took him four times to doctors, who diagnosed malnutrition. Just before Vivek was born, the family even got electricity.So why was Vivek malnourished? It is a question being asked about children across India, where a long economic boom has done little to reduce the vast number of children. Now, an emerging body of scientific studies suggest that Vivek and many of the 162 million other children under the age of 5 in the world who are malnourished are suffering less a lack of food than poor sanitation.
Like almost everyone else in their village, Vivek and his family have no toilet,
and the district where they live has the highest concentration of people who defecate outdoors. As a result, children are exposed to a bacterial brew that often sickens them, leaving them unable to attain a healthy body weight no matter how much food they eat. “These children's bodies divert energy and nutrients away from growth and brain development to prioritize infection-fighting survival,“ said Jean Humphrey , a professor of human nutrition at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “When this happens during the first two years of life, children become stunted. What's particularly dis turbing is that the lost height and intelligence are permanent.““Our realization about the connection between stunting and sanitation is just emerging,“ said Sue Coates, chief of water, sanitation and hygiene at Unicef India. “ At this point, it is still just an hypothesis.“
Achild raised in India is far more likely to be malnourished than one from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe or Somalia, the planet's poorest countries.
Stunting affects 65 million Indian kids under 5, including a third of those from the richest families. Half of India, or at least 620 million people, defecate outdoors. And while this share has declined slightly in the past decade, an analysis of census data shows that rapid population growth has meant that most Indians are being exposed to more human waste than ever before.
“The difference in average height between Indian and African children can be explained entirely by differing concentrations of open defecation,“ said Dean Spears, an economist at the Delhi School of Economics. “There are far more people defecating outside in India more closely to one another's children and homes than there are in Africa or anywhere else in the world.“ NYT NEWS SERVICE
Like almost everyone else in their village, Vivek and his family have no toilet,
and the district where they live has the highest concentration of people who defecate outdoors. As a result, children are exposed to a bacterial brew that often sickens them, leaving them unable to attain a healthy body weight no matter how much food they eat. “These children's bodies divert energy and nutrients away from growth and brain development to prioritize infection-fighting survival,“ said Jean Humphrey , a professor of human nutrition at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “When this happens during the first two years of life, children become stunted. What's particularly dis turbing is that the lost height and intelligence are permanent.““Our realization about the connection between stunting and sanitation is just emerging,“ said Sue Coates, chief of water, sanitation and hygiene at Unicef India. “ At this point, it is still just an hypothesis.“
Achild raised in India is far more likely to be malnourished than one from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe or Somalia, the planet's poorest countries.
Stunting affects 65 million Indian kids under 5, including a third of those from the richest families. Half of India, or at least 620 million people, defecate outdoors. And while this share has declined slightly in the past decade, an analysis of census data shows that rapid population growth has meant that most Indians are being exposed to more human waste than ever before.
“The difference in average height between Indian and African children can be explained entirely by differing concentrations of open defecation,“ said Dean Spears, an economist at the Delhi School of Economics. “There are far more people defecating outside in India more closely to one another's children and homes than there are in Africa or anywhere else in the world.“ NYT NEWS SERVICE
Source:::: The Times of India, 18.07.2-14, p.10, http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31804&articlexml=Poor-sanitation-may-afflict-well-fed-kids-18072014010048
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