Chronic malnutrition: key questions
1. What is chronic malnutrition?
Children who suffer from chronic malnutrition fail to grow to their full genetic potential, both mentally and physically. The main symptom of this measured is stunting - shortness in height compared to others of the same age group - and takes a relatively long time to develop. There is a critical window for a child's optimal physical and mental growth and development, from when it is still in its mother's womb and during its first two years of life. Efforts to intervene during this period to counter the effects of malnutrition can reverse the harm it causes, but if the opportunity is missed, the child will never make up the difference in growth and development, and will be adversely affected for the rest of his/her life.
2. What causes chronic malnutrition?
Chronic malnutrition can result from a variety of factors that can negatively affect child growth. These will vary according to the specific circumstances in which each child has been raised, and constellations of factors may exist which interact negatively to worsen the problem. These include a child's weight at birth, how they are fed as infants, whether they suffer frequent bouts of disease, the quality of their diet and nutritional intake, their mother's nutritional status at conception and during pregnancy, environmental hygiene, their mother's education and inadequate or inattentive care as a young child.
However, bigger global factors underpin these more immediate causes by limiting and undermining people's abilities to grow or earn sufficient amounts to feed themselves. These root causes of hunger include chronic poverty, unfair global trade rules and practices, poor management of agriculture by governments and climate change, which can all make even basic self-sufficiency and ability to survive in precarious conditions impossible, and HIV/AIDS and conflict, which often impact on the most productive members of society through death and displacement.
3. What happens to children who are stunted?
Chronic malnutrition will have severe consequences which affect the child for the rest of its life. It significantly increases the likelihood of premature death, and those who do survive are at much greater risk from a variety of afflictions including heart disease, diabetes and kidney damage, and are far less able to withstand infection. Failure to grow and reduced body size can also result in a lower physical capacity and energy for work as an adult, with associated economic costs. Malnutrition, through insufficient supply of both macronutrients (carbohydrates, fats and proteins) and certain micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.), also has major long-term negative impacts on brain and nerve development and function, including on mental skills and activity, physical movement and coordination and the acquisition of skills needed to interact well socially. This damage tends to be reflected in lower IQs and poorer performance at school. Those who were chronically malnourished as children and eventually in turn become parents themselves can pass it on to the next generation in an ongoing cycle, as mothers with low body weight in turn give birth to small babies.
4. How much mortality is caused by malnutrition?
Every year, over 10 million children under the age of 5 die globally; malnutrition is directly or indirectly associated with more than half of these deaths. It is the main contributor to illness and disease in the world through diet-related risk factors such as micronutrient deficiencies, and undernutrition, the underlying cause for many of the principal child killers including diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria, measles and AIDS. Malnutrition compromises child immunity such that episodes of illness tend to last longer or be more severe, and interacts with infection in a negative vicious cycle, each worsening the effect of the other.
5. How many stunted children are there in the world and where is the problem the greatest?
According to UNICEF, there were an estimated 170 million stunted children living in developing countries in 2005. South Asia is the region with the highest percentage of its under-5 population stunted. Burundi's population has the most severe level of chronic malnutrition, but India has the largest absolute number of stunted children.
