Malnutrition Claiming Future Leaders In N/East – Expert

Nutritionist, Federal Polytechnic, Bauchi, Mrs Sosanya Mercy, yesterday said many future leaders in the North East region were being wasted by malnutrition.
Mercy, a senior lecturer in the Department of Food and Nutrition of the institution, said this in Bauchi while speaking at a roundtable of Bauchi State Network of Civil Society Organisations.
She emphasised that a lot of organisations were busy arguing on figure of children being malnourished while such human capital that could become presidents, scientists, senators, doctors and inventors were being eroded by malnutrition.
Mercy said that instead of arguing on statistics of children being threatened by the scourge of malnutrition provided by UNICEF and other bodies, stakeholders should concentrate on curbing the menace.
She, therefore, suggested that stakeholders should be busy working out modalities to ensure that the 667 million dollars meant for the affected children in the Lake Chad Basin reaches those in the remote areas.
“Enact nutrition sensitive macro-economic policies that could reach rural areas and embark on economic empowerment programme that could improve family income to increase access to food.
“Also improve food production, preservation and storage as well as condemn positive deviance approach to sustain nutrition for the people to curb malnutrition,” Mercy suggested.
She called on civil organisations to preach the gospel of hygienic handling of food, active feeding and breast feeding of children, develop standard recipes from local foods for parents in the rural areas and hinterlands.
society if such camps were closed down.
“If philanthropists and others refuses to adopt such children after closing all the camps, they must look for survival and hence, another round of trouble,” he alerted.
Dr Abdullah Yusuf of the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Teaching Hosoital (ATBUTH), Bauchi, had earlier said that the North East region accounts for 30 per cent burden of World population of malnourished children.
Yusuf quoted UNICEF figure of the region as accounting for 260 children death in 1,000 children while 12 per cent of such children in Bauchi state were highly malnourished.
He said that 2.5 million children in Nigeria were said be malnourished in 2016 which call for immediate government intervention.