Poor Nutrition Stunting Growth in 200 Mil. Children
Novemeber 11, 2009
The Associated Press
by Ariel David and Maria Cheng
Nearly 200 million children in poor countries have stunted growth because of insufficient nutrition, according to a new report published by UNICEF Wednesday before a three-day international summit on the problem of world hunger.
The head of a U.N. food agency called on the world to join him in a day of fasting ahead of the summit to highlight the plight of 1 billion hungry people.
Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, said he hoped the fast would encourage action by world leaders who will take part in the meeting at his agency’s headquarters starting Monday.
The U.N. Children’s Fund published a report saying that nearly 200 million children under five in poor countries were stunted by a lack of nutrients in their food.
More than 90 percent of those children live in Africa and Asia, and more than a third of all deaths in that age group are linked to undernutrition, according to UNICEF.
While progress has been made in Asia — rates of stunted growth dropped from 44 percent in 1990 to 30 percent last year — there has been little success in Africa. There, the rate of stunted growth was about 38 percent in 1990. Last year, the rate was about 34 percent.
South Asia is a particular hotspot for the problem, with just Afghanistan, Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan accounting for 83 million hungry children under five.
“Unless attention is paid to addressing the causes of child and maternal undernutrition today, the costs will be considerably higher tomorrow,” said UNICEF executive director Ann M. Veneman in a statement.
Diouf said he would begin a 24-hour fast on Saturday morning. The agency also launched an online petition against world hunger through a Web page featuring a video with Diouf counting from one to six to remind visitors that every six seconds a child dies from hunger.
The U.N. children’s agency called for more strategies like vitamin A supplementation and breast-feeding to be rolled out more widely. That could cut the death rate in kids by up to 15 percent, UNICEF said.
Autism Rates Double
October 5, 2009
ABC News
By Lauren Cox and Sarah Sargenti
Parents are reporting cases of autism at double the rate of the last U.S. government survey in 2003, prompting calls for more research and spawning doubts about the true number of children affected.
Researchers estimate that now 1.1 percent, or 1 in 91 children, were told they had a disorder on the autism spectrum, according to a parent survey on the health of more than 78,000 children included in the National Survey of Children’s Health. The last survey, conducted in 2003, estimated just 0.57 percent of children had autism.
But whether a change in diagnosis criteria or some factor in the children’s environment, or a combination of the two, led to the jump in reported cases remains unclear.
“This survey means that there are a whole lot of families struggling with this and not enough resources,” said Rita Sheffler, a mother of a child with autism and a member of the National Autism Association. “We need more funding and research and need it right away. If children don’t receive appropriate treatments at a young age, there aren’t enough facilities for adults and society is not prepared if they do not find meaningful treatments.”
Although many doctors are fighting for research dollars to investigate autism, specialists do not necessarily trust the numbers as an official estimate, especially because the survey wasn’t set up to confirm or explore each time a parent reported an autism diagnosis.
“This should not be the ‘official’ estimate,” said Dr. Max Wiznitzer, a pediatric neurologist at University Hospitals in Cleveland.
“While the authors state that the survey results and previous surveys are similar to results of reviews of records, both have a limitation — the assumption that the parent report and the records accurately reflect the diagnosis,” he said
Some of the reporting seemed to match to well-documented statistics, such as the fact that boys were four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls in the survey, a commonly known gender difference in the autism community.
However, the high rate of recovery from autism reported by the parents raised the suspicions of doctors.
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