Mums in Bangladesh don’t know when their baby is malnourished

Mothers living in country areas of Bangladesh know dangerously little about what causes malnutrition, say experts. And many don’t know also how a poor diet puts babies and children at risk of harmful diseases such as diarrhoea and pneumonia. Forty-one per cent of under five year olds living in the south Asian country are underweight and 43 per cent are stunted by malnutrition, the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) reports.

Two million children aged six months to five years suffering from acute malnutrition because of poverty, badly-balanced diets and poor feeding, said a recent study by aid agencies. The leading international medical journal The Lancet, lists Bangladesh among 20 countries, which are home to 80 per cent of the world’s malnourished children. Child malnutrition levels are higher there than in many places in Africa. “The lack of awareness among rural mothers in our country is alarming,” Azad Choudhury, one of Bangladesh’s leading child care specialists, told the United Nations news service in the capital, Dhaka. “Few are conscious about the proper diet of an infant,” he said, adding that many also don’t know that malnutrition vastly increases the risk factors for other childhood diseases.

Thirty-six per cent of the country’s under five year-olds die from diarrhoea and pneumonia, health officials say. But only 30.9 per cent of rural mothers know how important breastfeeding is in the first six months, and only 38.8 per cent knew the proper age to start giving babies other types of food, the latest national Child and Mother Nutrition Survey revealed. “A balanced diet is crucial in avoiding malnutrition. The people of our country, especially in the rural areas are not properly informed about the importance of having a balanced diet,” said Ferdousi Begum of Dhaka Medical College. More than 80 percent of the Bangladeshi diet is made up of rice, he told the news service.

Among children whose mothers can’t read or write, 46.8 per cent are underweight - more than twice the proportion of those whose mothers have had a formal education.But among children whose mothers had 10 or more years of formal education, those numbers dropped to 21.4 and 24.7 per cent respectively. “We are trying hard to address the malnutrition situation,” said Mustafizur Rahman, assistant director of National Nutrition Programme aimed at improving the country’s nutritional status. “A lot of progress has been made but we still have a long way to go.”

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children