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News/Event Item
Malnutrition Is Cheating Its Survivors, and Africa's Future
Dec 28, 2006
By Michael Wines
In this corrugated land of mahogany mountains and tan, parched valleys, it is hard to tell which is the greater scandal: the thousands of children malnutrition kills, or the thousands more it allows to survive.
Malnutrition still kills here, though Ethiopia's infamous famines are in abeyance. In Wag Hamra alone, the northern area that includes Shimider, at least 10,000 children under age 5 died last year, thousands of them from malnutrition-related causes.
Yet almost half of Ethiopia's children are malnourished, and most do not die. Some suffer a different fate. Robbed of vital nutrients as children, they grow up stunted and sickly, weaklings in a land that still runs on manual labor. Some become intellectually stunted adults, shorn of as many as 15 I.Q. points, unable to learn or even to concentrate, inclined to drop out of school early.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times
For the Full Article, visit
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/122806HB.shtml
category: News from Other Sources : General Health News
contributed by Olga Zhuykova on 31 December 2006
Africa :
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