Malnourishment kills a 3 year old

Maya at FFLV(From Iron to Gold)

People of India have been victimized repeatedly over decades by Malnourishment. One such victim was a 3-year-old boy named Rashid Ahmed. A renowned hospital in New Delhi where he was rushed into for treatment, claim that the reason of his death was Malaria, however, his mother Nazia and his brother affirmed that the actual reason was malnourishment. They were poverty-stricken and could not afford food.  “It was hunger that killed him,” said Doctor Gaurav, who worked the night of August 15 at St. Stephen’s Hospital and was on watch when the toddler died. “He was so weak, so malnourished, that he would have died the first time he ever got really sick - - from malaria, diarrhea, anything.”

India’s failure to feed its people came as the economy accelerated, with gross domestic product per capita almost doubling in the past decade.

In the 2005 National Family Health Survey, when India last weighed, measured and counted its children for signs of hunger, it found 46 percent -- 31 million -- weighed too little for their ages, almost an entire Canada of malnourished under-three-year-olds. Anemia prevents the absorption of nutrients; as do the diarrhea and other diseases caused by poor hygiene and sanitation. In sheer numbers, 4 out of 10 malnourished children in the world are Indian, more than in all of Africa. War-torn Sudan and famine-struck Eritrea had smaller percentages of malnourished children, at about 32 percent, according to the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.  India’s hungry children are likely to have lower cognitive skills, grow up to be weakened workers, suffer from chronic illnesses and die prematurely, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“The problem of malnutrition is a national shame,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in January, in one of about 50 public speeches where he has mentioned the subject. “Despite impressive growth in our gross domestic product, the level of under-nutrition in the country is unacceptably high.” Rural Indians never have, and have seen their intake slide to 2,020 calories in 2010, from a high of 2,266 calories in 1973, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data from the National Sample Survey Office.

A National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau study in nine states that make up the majority of India’s malnourished population showed a steeper decline, with average rural calorie counts falling to about 1,900 in 2005 from 2,340 in 1979. Daily protein intake dropped to 49 grams (1.5 ounces) from 63 grams.

The global average is 77 grams, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. The worldwide average daily caloric intake is about 2,800 calories a day. Neither the diets of Nazia nor her two surviving children meet the averages. Nazia tried and support her children by begging alms in the New Delhi Railway Station.  Nazia’s family used to survive on some mere food stuffs available. That adds up their daily consumption of 1,500 calories to 1,600 calories of mostly carbohydrates. That places the family in the poorest quarter of Indians in terms of nutrition, with the group averaging 1,624 calories a day, according to Bloomberg calculations based on National Sample Survey data. “Forty years of efforts to raise how much food-grains Indians are able to eat has been destroyed by a mere dozen years of economic reform,” Utsa Patnaik, a professor at New Delhi-based Jawaharlala Nehru University said. Her research shows that per capita availability of rice, wheat and other food grains in India has fallen from 177 kilograms in early 1990s to 153 kilograms in 2004.

Riddled With Graft

The government has expanded subsidy programs, spending about $11 billion in 2011 -- about 5 percent of the central government’s $231 billion budget -- to buy and distribute food at below-market prices to people officially designated as poor.

More than 30 investigations by the National Human Rights Commission, the Supreme Court and anti-corruption agencies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation have concluded that the public distribution is riddled with graft. As much as 40 percent of food purchased for the poor doesn’t reach them, according to the UN’s Standing Committee on Nutrition.

“Subsidies don’t reach the poor. Trickle-down doesn’t reach the poor. Nothing reaches the poor,” said Yogendra Alagh, an economist in Gujarat state who first proposed in 1972 the calorie guidelines that still govern food policy in India. “In the past two or three decades, we’ve regressed backwards into a country that can’t even guarantee a poor, pregnant woman a glass of milk so the next generation isn’t born stunted.”

At the same time, the number of rich is swelling. Households with more than $1 million in assets jumped 21 percent in the past year alone, a May 31 Boston Consulting Group report shows.

Efforts to improve sanitation are struggling to keep pace with a growing population and the spread of urban slums.  

Nazia recalls that she moved into Delhi expecting a brighter and happier future, but something totally different happened. 

Across India, the percentage of daily calorie needs being met by fruit and vegetables dropped between 1993 and 2010, according to the National Sample Survey Office. Rural families get 1.8 percent of their energy from those foods, from 2 percent in 1993, the data show. For city-dwellers, the share fell to 2.6 percent to 3.3 percent. In the weeks before he died, Rashid tasted his first ice cream. Older brother Akbar was given one by a foreign tourist at the railway station, and he ran back home before it could melt so he could share it with Rashid.  “It was the sweetest thing I’ve ever had,” said Akbar, describing how he and Rashid licked the inside of the cardboard container, and then saved it as a reminder.

Both Rashid’s brothers survived malaria, common in Delhi’s slums during the monsoons, when rain water pools in potholes and open sewers for the Anopheles mosquito to breed. Rashid was weaker. Aslam, in an old picture taken for an identity card when he was three, appears to have rounded cheeks, and his arms were thicker than Rashid’s, his mother said. That may have been the result of two years when he lived with his grandparents in the village. When Akbar was 3, his father had been alive, and food was not that scarce.

Staff at St. Stephen’s Hospital weighed Rashid when his mother brought him in, shivering from eight hours of malaria- induced fevers. He weighed 12 kilos and his arms were “thin as sticks,” said Gaurav, the doctor.

Malnourishment had left his immune system too weak to fight the parasitic disease. He struggled with the richer hospital food and wasn’t able to properly absorb the chloroquine he was given for the malaria. A saline drip helped his condition a little, said Gaurav, who said he recalled the night so vividly because Rashid was the first child to die under his care. Gaurav gave the listless toddler medicines to lower his temperature, while mother Nazia tried to cool his skin with dampened rags.

To boost Rashid’s energy, Gaurav tried a trick that had worked with other children in his care: he gave an orderly the equivalent of 50 cents to buy ice cream.

“He ate three in three hours,” said Nazia.

Hence the present situation of the country as a whole is detestable. The Government and Non-Governmental Organizations co-operatively should try and eradicate social menaces like malnourishment and poverty. 

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-06-13/early-death-assured-in-india-where-900-million-go-hungry.html (Originally by : Mehul Srivastava)