Lack of food is the leading cause
of child death worldwide, killing 3.1 million children each year and accounting
for 45 percent of all child mortality.
Undernourished children who survive still face
a daunting future, including reduced intellectual capacity and a higher risk of
disease and disability. And while economic growth is presumed to get more
children fed, a booming economy alone doesn't fix the problem, researchers say.
Children's health isn't tracking with
improvements in standard of living and economic growth, according to , a social
epidemiologist at Harvard University and the study's senior author.
Subramanian and his colleagues evaluated
data from 36 low- and middle-income countries collected from 1990 to 2011.
Researchers looked at each country's gross domestic product and the proportion
of stunted, underweight and wasted (low weight for height) children under 3
years old.
An increase in GDP per capita resulted in
an insignificant decline in stunting. And when the researchers compared the
changes in GDP to the changes in the number of wasting and underweight
children, there was no correlation at all.
"It wasn't that [the
association] was just weak or small," Subramanian told Shots. That was the
case, he said, especially for stunting. More striking was the fact that the
effect overall "was just practically zero." He says things like
unequal income distribution and lack of efficient implementation of public
services are possible causes.
The were published Thursday in
the journal Lancet Global Health.
Countries that grow economically tend to
invest the money back into sectors that led to the growth in the first place,
Subramanian says. Consider India, where the tourism industry plays an important
role in the country's economy and is a rapidly growing sector.
"I see dramatic improvements
in four-lane roads ... airports getting fancier, which helps people like me
when I'm traveling," he says. "However, for the majority of the
population, I don't see improvements for the slums that I pass through every
day where I lived."
UNICEF did report in overall child
nutrition in 2013, but with the number of undernourished children still in the
hundreds of millions and with progress slow in the poorest parts of the world,
Subramanian says "we haven't made a huge dent, for sure."
The latest UNICEF indicates that
among children ages 5 and younger, over a quarter were stunted, 16 percent
underweight and 11 percent wasted in 2011, with numbers highest in sub-Saharan
Africa and South Asia.
The solution starts with understanding how
a child becomes malnourished, Subramanian says.
One way is through food insecurity, both
in access to food and the nutrients in the food available. Another is lack of
sanitation and clean water. Both lead to higher incidence of disease, which in
turn stunts a child's growth.
"We do know that these
factors that actually directly affect undernutrition causally have not improved
a heck of a lot in these countries ... despite economic growth," says
Subramanian.
Source
:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/03/27/294895305/a-booming-economy-doesnt-save-children-from-malnutrition
Comment :
This article is mostly true since we can
find the example of the article’s content in this country. Indonesia’s economy
grows regularly since it’s fallen in 1998 and most foreign investors depends their
life on this country. Not to mention other examples such as better
infrastructure and life quality in mid and high class. But, we still can see
poverty in some area, like slum areas in Jakarta. Main reason is that the
government that took the responsibility cannot see people that are risked of
getting malnutrition, which caused by low quality of lower apparatus.
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