The Report of the Parliament Select Committee (PSC) whether Child Malnutrition in Sri Lanka is aggravating and to identify short term, medium term and long-term measures to be taken in that regard, as well as to oversee the speedy implementation of the identified measures, was presented to Parliament by MP Rohini Kumari Wijerathna on behalf of PSC Chair Vadivel Suresh, on Wednesday (4).
The Report presents that Child Under-nutrition can be presented in 4 forms such as Stunting (low length/height for age), Wasting (low weight for length/ height or low BMI for age), Underweight (low weight for age) and Micro Nutrient Deficiencies/insufficiencies – a lack/ inadequacy of important Vitamins and Minerals.
The Report further states that babies born with a birth weight of 2,500 gms or less, are considered to be low birth weight and according to the National Nutrition and Micronutrient Survey conducted in 2022, the prevalence of low birth weight in a nationally representative sample was 15.9%. The June 2023 Nutrition Month report identified an increase in Underweight and Stunting among infants and children up to two years of age compared to 2022. The most alarmingly high Underweight rate of 24.6% was recorded in Nuwara Eliya district, where 1 in every 4 children was identified as moderately or severely Underweight, the report said.
In June 2023, the proportion of children affected by poverty in Sri Lanka is 10%, according to this report. 1.2% of all children under the age of 5 are affected by severe Acute Malnutrition and numerically nearly 16,000 children suffer from such Acute Malnutrition.
The Nutrition Month 2023 report revealed a 10.3% increase in Stunting among children under the age of 5, an increase of 9.2% from the previous year. The report has revealed that the causes of Chronic Malnutrition, which are short or short in height compared to children of the same age, occur over time.
Meanwhile, according to the survey conducted in 2022, a nationally representative sample of children aged 5-18 years found that Shortness, Overweight and Obesity increase with age.
The report has shown that lack of Food Security at the household level has also contributed to Malnutrition. Due to the economic crisis in 2022, 98% of the entire population has been affected by the increase in food prices and, as a result, 74% of the households could not afford to buy food or daily essentials in the last 6 months of that year, according to the report. The number of Food Insecure households increased to 24% in the 3rd quarter of 2023, compared to 17% in March 2023. A third of all families have reduced the frequency of cooking or limited their consumption, while a quarter live on food from neighbours.
The report provides conclusions and recommendations for improving Child Nutrition. It emphasised the importance of immediate attention to children before they become chronically malnourished.
The report also emphasised the need for adequately skilled field health staff to provide quality Maternal and Child Nutrition (MCN) services for Maternal and Child Health (MCH) programmes. The report also emphasised that Vitamin A supplementation should be considered again before this becomes a problem again, as Vitamin A supplementation has been discontinued for schoolchildren.
The need for urgent action to improve the Food Security status of families with children under the age of 5 has also been highlighted.
The report also recommends using existing health management information systems to identify focal areas of Malnutrition in children and to map risk to address Malnutrition in order to identify the most vulnerable families and causal factors.
A number of short, medium and long-term recommendations have been presented in this report, including uninterrupted supply of nutritional supplements to pregnant mothers and malnourished children, control of prices of those ingredients to ensure affordable availability of ingredients for a healthy and low-cost diet, the implementation and monitoring of pre-school feeding programme, school feeding programme and school canteen guidelines to provide quality food.
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