DEVELOPMENT: Billions Suffer Lack of Vitamins, Minerals

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 24 2004 (IPS) - Simple and cheap measures, similar to fortifying salt with iodine, could help control vitamin and mineral deficiencies that afflict up to a third of the world’s people, particularly children, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in a study released Wednesday.

The hardest-hit populations are in the developing South, it added.

”Everyone who cares about the future of children and the development of nations should heed this report,” UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy told reporters Wednesday.

”The overwhelming scope of the problem makes it clear that we must reach out to whole populations and protect them from the devastating consequences of vitamin and mineral deficiency,” she warned.

The study, ‘Vitamin and Mineral Deficiency: a Global Progress Report’, was presented jointly by UNICEF and the Ottawa-based Micronutrient Initiative.

It says, “The VM deficiency problem has largely been brought under control in the industrialised nations. It could now be controlled world-wide by essentially the same low-cost strategies – adding vitamins and minerals to staple foods, getting tablets and capsules or syrups to vulnerable groups, and educating the public about small changes to daily diets”.

”Resources and technology to bring vitamin and mineral deficiencies under control do exist,” said Venkatesh Mannar, president of the Micronutrient Initiative. ”What we need is the will, the effort and the action to fix this problem.”

On Monday, the U.N. Standing Committee on Nutrition released its own report, ‘Nutrition for Improved Development Outcomes’, which concluded that 10 million children below five years of age are dying every year, one-half of them from preventable nutrition-related causes.

While global gross domestic product (GDP) has doubled during the past 20 years, the number of under-weight, pre-school children has been cut by only 20 percent, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Administration and Management Catherine Bertini, former head of the World Food Programme, told reporters.

She described the trend as ”the scandal of malnutrition in the world today”.

”As the world grows richer, we do not keep up in the areas of improvement of nutrition,” said Bertini, who chairs the standing committee on nutrition.

Lawrence Haddad of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute singled out Africa, where every indicator – poverty, food insecurity, hunger and nutrition – showed that ”it has been going in the wrong direction for the last 10 years”.

As a result, children in sub-Saharan Africa are increasingly shorter, thinner, and have low birth weight, Haddad told reporters Monday.

According to the UNICEF report, severe micronutrient deficiency creates anaemia, cretinism and blindness. ”Vitamin A deficiency compromises the immune systems of approximately 40 percent of children under five in the developing world, leading to the deaths of one million youngsters each year”.

At the same time, says the study, iodine deficiency in pregnancy is causing as many as 20 million babies a year to be born mentally impaired.

UNICEF says the study offers for the first time, ”damage assessments” of vitamin and mineral deficiency in 80 countries that represent 80 percent of the world’s people.

Bellamy said that methods that have worked in industrialised nations are now so inexpensive and available that they could control vitamin and mineral deficiencies worldwide.

These include food fortification (adding essential vitamins and minerals to regularly consumed foods) and supplementation (reaching out to children and women of childbearing age with vitamin and mineral supplements in the form of low-cost capsules and syrups).

Equally important, says the UNICEF report, are public education, and controlling diseases like malaria, measles, diarrhoea and parasitic infections, which inhibit the absorption and utilisation of essential vitamins and minerals.

According to UNICEF, these methods have resulted in significant gains during the past decade.

A sustained effort to add iodine to salt consumed by two-thirds of the world’s households has protected about 70 million newborns a year, in some degree, against mental impairment.

And more than 40 developing countries are now reaching two-thirds or more of their young children with at least one high-dose vitamin A capsule every year.

”The effort to date is estimated to be saving the lives of more than 300,000 young children a year, and over time preventing the irreversible blindness of hundreds of thousands more,” according to the report.

UNICEF also calls on the food industry to develop, market, and distribute low-cost fortified food products and supplements, and for governments to help control vitamin and mineral deficiency through education and legislation.