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