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ACCRA, Ghana — More than a quarter of children under
\n the age of 5 in the developing world are underweight due to hunger, poor
\n diet, or disease, according to the first UN study in 15 years to examine
\n global nutrition trends for the very young.<\/p>\n
The UNICEF report<\/a>, released yesterday, also found that more than half of The numbers ”should be a wake-up call to the world," Dr. Rainer Gross, from the Boston Thirty years ago, in what seems like another life, This occurred during a period The idea was engendered, in a typical grad student way, by The numbers bore him out. Whereas an adult could go for Research just coming out at that time showed The solution, according to our professor, was to identify OK, next problem: how to target the nutritional aid Our thesis advisor proposed an easier way. Babies’ The next problem, and the point at which the Dowbrigade So the Dowbrigade set out to establish what the existing Those were the days when our life really meant something! Nevertheless, it was a refreshing blast from the past, Latin America had the most progress of any region in the from the same article in the Globe<\/a><\/p>\n Full UN Report<\/a><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ACCRA, Ghana — More than a quarter of children under the age of 5 in the developing world are underweight due to hunger, poor diet, or disease, according to the first UN study in 15 years to examine global nutrition … Continue reading
\n the world’s 147 million underweight children live in South Asia.<\/p>\n
\n UNICEF’s chief of nutrition, told reporters in a conference call from New
\n York. ”Undernutrition is a global epidemic and one of the highest barriers
\n to progress."<\/p>\n
\n Globe<\/a><\/p>\n
\n the Dowbrigade was a graduate student at the Institute of Latin American
\n Studies of the University of Texas flagship campus in Austin, majoring
\n in Physical Anthropology, and writing our Masters Thesis on “Varying
\n Birth Weights of Newborns in the Three Ecosystems of Peru: Sierra, Selva
\n and Costa”.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n in which we were enamored of "hard" science, convinced
\n that our previous five years (with time off for field work) studying Shamanism and Ethnobotany at
\n Harvard had just been an
\n extended
\n excuse
\n for getting wasted. If you can’t weigh a phenomena, or scientifically measure
\n it somehow, it didn’t exist, we thought. So we decided to weigh babies.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n the work of one of our professors, who was convinced that the number
\n one barrier to Third World (such was the terminology back in the day)
\n countries struggling to rise out of underdevelopment was infantile malnutrition.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n four or five months of the year with a much diminished diet, almost to
\n the point of starvation, and yet recover without permanent damage when
\n the harvest came in or when additional nutrition was provided, when this
\n happens to a child under 5, he or she suffers permanent physical and
\n mental developmental damage.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n that this permanent retardation could limit individuals to 70-80% of
\n their
\n normal height, weight and intelligence. Kids who normally would
\n have a 100 IQ were stuck down in the borderline retarded range, and the
\n borderline geniuses were coming out just average. Plus, most of the kids, and therefore the population in general, were short, weak and had impaired immune systems! It was pretty obvious that
\n a country with a youth profile like that would have a rough time competing
\n in the international test of brain and brawn that is the global marketplace
\n for goods, services and ideas.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n the areas with the most severe nutritional deficiencies, and institute
\n crash programs to get dietary supplementation going for the
\n children in those zones.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n programs to the kids that need it most? How to measure the nutritional
\n level in
\n a family, or a village, or a province? The traditional, time-consuming
\n and tedious method was to send a team of anthropologists and nutritionists
\n to the village or zone, and have them stay in place over an entire year,
\ncounting, weighing and recording everything that the people consume, and sending
\n samples back to a laboratory for nutritional analysis. Difficult and
\n expensive.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n average birth weight, he contended, is a very accurate indicator of
\n the nutritional
\n status of the mother over her pregnancy. The areas where the babies
\n were the lightest would be the areas where the nutrition was poorest,
\n and where the nutritional supplementation programs should be targeted.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n got directly involved, is that nobody knew what the NORMAL birth weight
\n WAS for a country like Peru, where our field work was centered. Making
\n matters more complicated, Peru has three completely distinct eco-systems:
\n the desert-dry coastal plain, the indomitable Andes highlands, and an
\n extensive swath of the Amazon basin. Each ecosystem had its own
\n flora, fauna, food sources and racial and ethnic population. No one had ever compared how much babies weighed in the three zones.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n regional average birth weights were. We started out in the records rooms
\n of several National Social Security hospitals in poor neighborhoods of
\n major coastal cities. In the mountains, where most births occur in homes
\n and adobe huts, we managed to find two midwives who actually carried
\n around scales on their burros and weighed the infants they delivered.
\n In the jungle we found a Red Cross program that had established maternity
\n clinics at riverbank stopovers and trading posts up and down Amazon tributaries.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n Out in the middle of the Amazon, collecting vital data in a race to save
\n lives
\n and
\n bring
\n food
\n to hungry
\n infants. Of course, much of our data was later stolen on the train from
\n Cuzco to Arequipa, by a theif who was probably so pissed off to discover
\n that the gringo’s backpack he had so cleverly swiped was full of a bunch
\n of useless papers that he burnt or used them to wipe his family’s asses,
\n and that we later dropped out of the project, and in fact the professional
\n field of anthropology, when we met and married a Peruvian Princess from
\n an Italian family whose father was a Judge and pressured us to get a "real" job,
\n and now we earn our living teaching the English language to filthy rich, spoiled
\n foreigners with wristwatches worth more than our automobile whose parents are in the process of buying America out from under us.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n in some tiny way validating a phase of our life we had almost left behind,
\n to read, later in the Globe article:<\/em><\/p>\n
\n world, reducing the number of underweight children under 5 by an average
\n of 3.8 percent every year between 1990 and 2004. The best performers in
\n Latin America were Cuba, which reduced its prevalence of underweight
\n children from 9 percent in 1996
\n to 4 percent in 2000; the Dominican Republic, which dropped from 10
\n percent in 1991 to 5 percent in 2002; Jamaica, from 7 percent in 1989
\n to 4 percent in 2002; and Peru<\/strong> from 11 percent in 1992 to 7 percent
\n in 2000.<\/p>\n