International health advocates and policymakers still have work to do to meet the nutrition goals set by the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children in 2002, according to a survey of nutrition needs in developing regions published by Tulane University researchers.
The researchers benchmarked the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency, anemia, iodine-deficiency disorders and underweight children as measures of malnutrition in developing regions.
“Finding ways to meet the basic nutritional requirements of humans for optimal growth and development is essential to global health and economic success,” says lead author John Mason, professor of international health and development. “Malnutrition has serious economic consequences. People who lack some or all of these important micronutrients have significantly lower IQs, reduced work productivity, compromised immune systems. and delayed mental development.”
Mason says that seemingly simple solutions, such as promoting the use of iodized table salt to prevent iodine deficiency, can be challenging in remote or extremely impoverished regions. Yet, he says, the societal benefit of continuing to promote such interventions is clear.
“Without iodized salt there would be about twice as many iodine deficiencies,” says Mason. “The increased use of iodized salt over the past decades has saved close to 800 million people from iodine deficiency. At the beginning of the 1990s nearly one in five people in developing regions had an iodine deficiency. Now the rate is between six and eight percent.”
According to the report, Vitamin A deficiency persists in about one percent of the population, but is slated for elimination.