Understanding malnutrition in India

Malnutrition is one of the largest factors supressing India's spectacular growth. In a country of lunar missions, billionaires, and nuclear power, a staggering 46% of all India children under 5 years old are still underweight. In India, where everything is on a large scale, malnutrition is daunting - an estimated 200 million children are underweight at any given time, with more than 6 million of those children suffering from the worst form of malnutrition, severe acute malnutrition. Experts estimate that malnutrition constitutes over 22% of India's disease burden, making malnutrition one of the nation's largest health threats.

The causes of malnutrition and therefore the solutions to the problem vary as much as the Indian people. To understand and solve malnutrition requires patience, nuance, flexibility, and above all determination.

Follow me as I set out to understand malnutrition in the subcontinent and begin to tackle it

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Absentee blogger - with good reason!

It has been a hectic past few months since I last posted. We hired, trained and re-trained the staff, finished our exhaustive baseline survey across 500 villages, measuring over 60,000 children, finding and counseling thousands of malnourished children and referring over 100 children to NRCs for treatment. We also inaugurated and admitted our first patients into one of the first Public Private Partnership Nutrition Rehabilitation Centers in the state. Now that we've got the system set up, the intervention really begins. I promise to blog more regularly on our operational experiences in combatting malnutrition at the community level.

For now, here are a few blog entries from the RMF website on what we've been up to.
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