Global progress in combating child malnutrition masks problem spots
Only 28 of 105 low- to mid-income countries are set to meet WHO’s 2025 hunger-reduction targets
By Sujata Gupta
The percentage of children with serious malnutrition decreased around the world from 2000 to 2017, a new study finds. But the problem stayed flat or even worsened in some countries, including swaths of Nigeria, Congo, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Guatemala. And trouble spots remained in even relatively well-off countries such as China and Peru, researchers report January 8 in Nature.
“There are areas that have been left behind,” says Damaris Kinyoki, a public health expert at the University of Washington in Seattle. The results were especially disappointing for middle-income countries, she says. “We expected them to have better progress.”
Prolonged childhood malnutrition is associated with lifelong cognitive and physical impairments, or even death. It’s difficult to directly measure so researchers use a proxy measurement called childhood growth failure, defined as insufficient height and weight for children under age 5. Typically, growth failure rates are assessed at the state or national level, but that broad geographic scale can obscure more localized health disparities. So municipal leaders can struggle to develop targeted programs for their communities.
Now, building on their earlier research in Africa, Kinyoki and her colleagues zoomed in individually on almost 3.7 million five-kilometer-square “pixels” across 105 low- and middle-income countries — an area encompassing 99 percent of all children suffering from malnutrition. The team then estimated annual childhood growth failure rates in each pixel from 2000 to 2017 using information from household surveys representing 4.6 million children.