Child wasting rate

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. In low and middle income countries macroeconomic volatility is common, and severe negative economic shocks can substantially increase poverty and food insecurity. Less well understood are the implications of these contractions for child acute malnutrition (wasting), a major risk factor for under-5 mortality. This study explores the nutritional impacts of economic growth shocks over 1990–2018 by linking wasting outcomes collected for 1.256 million children from 52 countries to lagged annual changes in economic growth. Estimates suggest that a 10% annual decline in national income increases moderate/severe wasting prevalence by 14.4–17.8%. An exploration of possible mechanisms suggests negative economic shocks may increase risks of inadequate dietary diversity among children. Applying these results to the latest economic growth estimates for 2020 suggests that COVID-19 could put an additional 9.4 million preschoolers at risk of wasting, net of the effects of preventative policy actions. Macroeconomic volatility is far more common in low and middle income countries (LMICs) for a variety of economic, political, and environmental reasons. However, th...

Key facts • Malnutrition, in all its forms, includes undernutrition (wasting, stunting, underweight), inadequate vitamins or minerals, overweight, obesity, and resulting diet-related noncommunicable diseases. • 1.9 billion adults are overweight or obese, while 462 million are underweight. • Globally in 2020, 149 million children under 5 were estimated to be stunted (too short for age), 45 million were estimated to be wasted (too thin for height), and 38.9 million were overweight or obese. • Around 45% of deaths among children under 5 years of age are linked to undernutrition. These mostly occur in low- and middle-income countries. At the same time, in these same countries, rates of childhood overweight and obesity are rising. • The developmental, economic, social, and medical impacts of the global burden of malnutrition are serious and lasting, for individuals and their families, for communities and for countries. Malnutrition refers to deficiencies, excesses, or imbalances in a person’s intake of energy and/or nutrients. The term malnutrition addresses 3 broad groups of conditions: • undernutrition, which includes wasting (low weight-for-height), stunting (low height-for-age) and underweight (low weight-for-age); • micronutrient-related malnutrition, which includes micronutrient deficiencies (a lack of important vitamins and minerals) or micronutrient excess; and • overweight, obesity and diet-related noncommunicable diseases (such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and s...

In June 2019, the UN Secretary General commissioned UN agencies working on nutrition (FAO, UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP and WHO) with preparing the first-ever Global Action Plan (GAP) on Child Wasting. The plan aimed to respond to the slow progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goal on reducing childhood wasting, and to growing calls for a more coordinated and streamlined UN approach to addressing this challenge. The newly released GAP Framework identifies four critical outcomes to achieving the SDG target on child wasting and to improving early detection and treatment for those who need it:​ Under each outcome, the Framework identifies pathways to accelerate the delivery of essential actions and to create an enabling environment for their success. UNICEF will lead the development of the GAP Country Operational Roadmaps, supporting countries to implement context-specific commitments to reach the global SDG target on child wasting. As estimated 50 million children, or 7.3% of the total under-five population around the world suffer from wasting, a form of undernutrition that can be lethal. In 2015, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), governments around the world committed to reducing this number to <5% by 2025 and to <3% by 2030. Yet, since these targets were adopted, the proportion of wasted children has remained largely unchanged. Wasting affects children in virtually every continent on the planet, with the largest number of children suffering from w...

Characteristic Percentage of children World 6.7 % Northern Africa 6.6 % Sub-Saharan Africa 5.9 % Eastern Africa 5.2 % Middle Africa 6.2 % Southern Africa 3.2 % Western Africa 6.9 % Central Asia 2.3 % Eastern Asia 1.7 % South-eastern Asia 8.2 % Southern Asia 14.1 % Western Asia 3.5 % Caribbean 2.8 % Central America 0.9 % South America 1.4 % Northern America 0.2 % The most important statistics • Number of families in the US by number of children 2000-2022 • U.S. family households with children, by family type 1970-2021 • Weekly U.S. household grocery expenditure by household type 2020 • U.S. share of households with children with low food security by demographic 2019 • U.S. household food security share in 2020 • U.S. - share of children in food-insecure households 1998-2021 • Head Start program enrollment in the U.S. by state 2019 • Projected number of children enrolled in Medicaid in the U.S. 2020-2027 The most important statistics • Percentage of U.S. children and adolescents who were obese 1988-2018 • Share of obese high school students in the U.S. by state 2019 • Obese high school students in the U.S. in 2016-2017, by gender and ethnicity • Share of U.S. children with food allergies in the past year as of 2018, by ethnicity • Locations of food poisonings of U.S. children according to parents as of 2017 The most important statistics • U.S. food energy intake from food of male children and adolescents by age 2017/18 • U.S. food energy intake from food of female children a...

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India bagged the top spot in child wasting rate in the world with an increase of 4.3 percentage points in nine years, according to the This points at a serious food crisis since wasting is “a strong predictor of mortality among children under five and is usually the result of acute significant food shortage and/or disease,” according to United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef). Wasting among children under five rose to 20.8 per cent in 2019 from 16.5 per cent in 2010, revealed the GHI. The rate of wasting — low weight for height — in 24 developing countries is 10 per cent or more, according to Unicef. The GHI calculated hunger level and undernutrition worldwide by considering four indicators — undernourishment, child wasting, child mortality and child stunting. India ranked 102 on the index among 117 qualifying countries with a score of 30.3. Even North Korea, Niger, Cameroon fared better than India. Neighboring countries too bagged better spots — Sri Lanka (66), Nepal (73), Pakistan (94) and Bangladesh (88). India’s hunger indicators have a huge impact on the total indicators of the region owing to its large population, according to the index. When it comes to stunting in children under five, the country saw a dip, but it’s still high — 37.9 per cent in 2019 from 42 per cent in 2010. The current rate is very high in terms of public health significance, added the GHI. The index also commented on the state of open defecation in the country. Despite the Swachh Bharat campaign...

• Share to Facebook • Share to Twitter • Share to Linkedin A child every minute — that's how quickly the number of children suffering from severe wasting has been rising due to the current global food crisis. With millions of young lives at risk in 15 countries, UNICEF is calling for support to ramp up emergency lifesaving interventions. UNICEF has issued an urgent appeal for $1.2 billion to deliver lifesaving treatment to severely wasted children and to accelerate the rollout of other cost-effective solutions in areas hardest hit by the current global food crisis, which include several countries in the Horn of Africa and in Africa's Sahel region. On May 7, 2022, Zarghoneh, 9, cradles her baby brother at Kunar Central Hospital, Afghanistan, where he is being treated for severe acute malnutrition with support from UNICEF. © UNICEF/UN0659443/Bidel “Food aid is critical, but we cannot save starving children with bags of wheat," UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said. "We need to reach these children now with therapeutic treatment before it is too late.” Between January and June of this year, the number of severely malnourished children grew at a rate of one child every minute.* In response, UNICEF has already been scaling up nutrition interventions with partners in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Yemen. But more support is urgently needed ...