Does location matter? A study of malnutrition amongst Ethiopian children

The Nutrition Society Paper of the Month for March is from Public Health Nutrition and is entitled: ‘Local spatial clustering of stunting and wasting among children under the age of 5 years: implications for intervention strategies’.  Lead author, Seifu Hagos Gebreyesus, discusses the effects of location on malnutrition in Ethiopia. As malnutrition is a major public health problem in Ethiopia, we aimed to find out how the acute and chronic forms of undernutrition occur in the districts and kebeles (a kebele is the smallest administrative unit) in Ethiopia. Such knowledge could be helpful in improving our understanding of the distribution of undernutrition on a local scale, as well as designing targeted nutrition intervention programmes.   For this purpose, we surveyed children under five years old from 1744 households across six villages in Ethiopia. We measured children’s height, weight, and the geographic locations (latitudes and longitudes) of households. Using data from 2371 children, we evaluated how malnutrition is distributed within a district and its kebeles. Although many believe that undernutrition is equally distributed within an area, we found that children living in certain locations within a district were more susceptible to undernutrition than those living in different locations within the same district.  Children living within these vulnerable locations were 1.5 times more likely to be stunted, and 1.7 times more likely to be severely stunted than ch...
Source: The Nutrition Society - Category: Nutrition Authors: Source Type: news