Stunted Growth Linked to Poor Hygiene, Causes Premature Death
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Social
STATISTICS from the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (2014) indicate that 42 per cent of children under the age of five years, equivalent to four million in number, have suffered from stunted growth in the last decade.
The Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Mr Charles Pallangyo unveiled the data in Arusha recently when officiating at an International Workshop on Scaling up Rural Sanitation and Hygiene.
The forum was jointly organized by the ministry of Health and SNV Netherlands Development Organisation. "The figures are not only intimidating, but also call for concerted efforts to reverse the trend.
I am confident that once improved, sanitation and hygiene will significantly reduce the rate of children suffering from stunted growth," Pallangyo observed.
As for efforts to combat other communicable diseases, the PS said the nation has embarked on a national sanitation campaign to grapple with diarrhoea and other waterborne diseases compounded by poor hygienic surroundings that contribute significantly to stunting growth among children.
From the web we learn that stunted growth is a reduced growth rate in human development. It is a primary manifestation of malnutrition in early childhood, including malnutrition during fetal development brought on by the malnourished mother.
According to the latest UN estimates, an estimated 165 million children under 5 years of age, or 26 per cent were stunted in 2011. More than 90 per cent of the world's stunted children live in Africa and Asia.
Stunted children may never regain the height lost as a result of stunting, and most children will never gain the corresponding body weight. It also leads to premature death later in life because vital organs never fully develop during childhood.
The fact that an individual child falls below the fifth percentile for height for age on a growth reference curve may reflect normal variation in growth within a population: the individual child may be short simply because both parents carried genes for shortness and not because of inadequate nutrition.
The adverse socioeconomic environment and low levels of food availability compromise and probably delay the physical development of the affected children in all phases of growth.
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