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Hunger By Installment
The first star parols and Christmas belens are now decking this town. The "tambourine brigade” won’t be far behind: scrawny out-of-school kids who bang flattened bottle caps for off-key carols. They cadge coins from passers-by. These grimy "street troubadours" never heard of the 7th National Nutrition Survey. Yet, NNS is about them --and skewed chances their next Christmas, perhaps, could be better. Like the 5th and 6th surveys, this latest Food and Nutrition Research Institute study documents savaging, with little let up, of this country’s foundation: children and breast-feeding mothers. All three reports document miniscule progress to curb daily installment hunger. Malnutrition still keeps floodgates ajar to debilitating diseases: TB, blindness due to Vitamin A deficiency to energy-sapping anemia. “Shriveling away from hunger is not the stuff of headlines.” Sketchy reports on FNRI’s survey were published, then vanished. The evening news hewed to it’s daily diet of crime and political pap. Reporting significance is often a thankless chore. But it is essential, if the national debate is to move beyond today’s politicial drivel, In the past, we in media failed to adequately explain what those dry-as-dust nutrition statistics meant. Did we flunk again? Consider these excerpts from the 7th survey: Nutrition adequacy barely budged from cellar-levels of 2003 or 2005. “There are more undernourished children and nutritionally at-risk pregnant and lactating women today” than there were six years ago. “The prevalence of adults with chronic energy deficiency, however, has declined.” That’s the rare silver lining. Today, out of every hundred pre-schoolers, 26 are underweight. Another 28 didn’t come up to their expected normal height. And six were thin. That’s bad enough. But From 2005 to 2008, a significant increase in the proportion of underweight (24.6% to 26.2%) and under height (26.3% to 27.9%) among preschoolers was noted.” Scrub the jargon. It means: kids below 5 years today are more emaciated, shorter and skinnier than they used to be. The most crucial period for infants is while they’re still in the womb, and surviving until five years of age. Ensure mothers get adequate nutrition and pre-natal care. And that jacks up the chances for babies to mature bloom into talented adults instead of scrunching into stunted dwarfs. “Many of the things we need can wait,” Nobel Laureate Gabriel Mistral wrote. “The child can not wait. Now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood made, his sinews developed. To him, we can not say: tomorrow. His name is today.” Over the last three years, however, the proportion of “nutritionally at-risk” (i.e ill-fed) pregnant women hasn’t shrunk. In fact, the number inched up (1.7%). The “prevalence of underweight” women, who breast-fed, did become smaller. But the reduction was miniscule: from 13.9% to 13.1% Rewind to the 6th Nutrition Survey. That already found four out of ten women, who breast-fed then, were anemic. Six out of 10 infants, up to a year old, were anemic. Surprise? By age five, this stark proportion dwindled down to one or two infants. But irreversible damage had been inflicted by then. PEM or protein energy malnutrition, in fact, sends far too many Filipino pre-school children to premature graves, ADB and World Bank said in their previous study: “Early Child Development.”. But the real –and glossed-over-scandal is: proportions of Filipino infants who die are larger than in poorer countries like Bangaldesh, Kenya or Tanzania. The 7th Survey the means lethal cycle, described by the 5th and 6th stuidies, hasn’t been dismantled at all. The ill-fed today give birth to wizened infants who will mother the next generation of dwarfed babies. By age 3, many infants will be stunted, Asian Development Bank notes. “The small child eventually becomes a small mother. And her risk of dying in pregnancy is 10 times greater than a woman of normal height or weight.”. Ill-fed kids are deprived from “10 to 14 percent of their potential intelligence quotient (IQ), ADB said. Scientists dub this “cognitive deficits”. That is “mental capacity missing a few buttons on the remote control,” as the wry joke puts it. Cognitive loss is 10 percent for stunted kids. For iodine-deficient victims, the deficit can crest at four percent. That loss can never be recovered.” Up to their often earlier graves, those children will be boxed into lives far below God-given potentials. Will our kids be scrawnier, shorter, frailer –and less adept –than their Malaysian, Korean or Singaporean counterparts? Yes, if our officials persist in greed that denies the kids and mothers needed resources. Clean water reduces infant deaths by 23 percent, a study of 15 countries show. Peru proved that installation of a flush toilet cuts death rates by more than half (59%). Fortifying rice or pan de sal with micro-nutrients saves IQs. But our congressmen allocate themselves P1million each for foreign travels. If President Gloria Macapgal Arroyo’s statement of assets and liabilities is correct, her declared net worth more than doubled: from P66.8 million in 2001 to P143.54 million in 2008. Pampanga Rep Juan Miguel Arroyo’s net worth bolted from P5 million in his in 2002 to P99 million last year. Do they “drink the tears of children” and chose to be deaf to the “sighs of orphans”? E-mail: juanlmercado@gmail.com |
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