Malnutrition tales unsettle Nasarawa
To unravel the true situation of the state of Primary Healthcare Centres in Nasarawa State, visited Tudun Kauri PHC. A medical practitioner who didn’t want to be named said the causes of malnutrition is when a baby has not been well fed, possibly from the womb to about five years of age.
The cause is usually due to lack of balanced diet, coupled with lack of good hygiene, carelessness of parents, especially the mother who may be consuming only a particular food.
“Due to poverty, our community finds it difficult to change types of food consumed which causes malnutrition,” he said.
The medical practitioner called on husbands to support their wives by providing balanced diet at home instead of leaving their wives and eating out.
She advised that many can eat balanced diet like pap with beans cake in the morning, beans vegetables or any staple food in the afternoon and the traditional tuwo, eba or apku with draw
soup, cray-fish, or ‘daddawa’ which are all good for the baby.
However, findings by Daily Trust shows that malnourished children were given Therapeutic Food Supplement (RUTF) free in Primary Health care centres across the state, which is a balanced diet.
A staff in the facility said they have the RUTF in abundance. They test children using Upper Arm Circumference ‘UAC’ to measure the arms of patients. Green means that the child is not malnourished, while yellow means the child is malnourished, and red means the child is severely malnourished. In this case, they send them to Dalhatu Araf Specialist Hospital (DASH) for proper medical advice.
In Tudun Kauri, only three children died after they started taking the treatment from April to December 2018. This was mainly because the parents did not come back for more RUTF and they did not have their husbands’ assistance.
The RUTF consists of powdered groundnut, soya beans and other supplements combined in the sachet. The food is sourced from the United Nations Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF).
When contacted, the village head of Tudun Wada Kauri, Mai-Anguwa Ahmadu Tanko said, “I don’t have any reported case of death due to severe acute malnutrition in my ward. I will therefore go around and advice my subjects to have adequate diet for their families.
When contacted, the Executive Secretary of the Nasarawa State Health Care Development Agency (NAPHDA), Dr Muhammad Adis told Daily Trust that, “The claim that malnutrition and child diseases have led to the death of thirty children in Nasarawa State is misleading. Two thousand are being hospitalized, according to the National Nutrition and Health Survey (NNHS) conducted in Nigeria in 2018, shows that the national rate of severe acute malnutrition among children under five years is 1.5 percent of 486,000 patients, while Nasarawa has a burden of severe acute malnutrition of 0.5 percent totaling 4,600 among under children.”
According to him, NNHS statistics show the list of states with severe acute malnutrition as follows: Adamawa has2.2 percent, Yobe 1.8, Zamfara and Jigawa has 1.6 percents, Bauchi 1.3 percent,FCT 1.2 percent, Kano, Kebbi and Kwara 1.1 percents, Gombe, Kaduna, Katsina
and Sokoto have 1.0 percents, Borno has 0.9 percents, Plateau has 0.6 percents, Nasarawahas 0.5 percents, Niger has 0.3 percents, Taraba has 0.2 percents Kogi has zeropercents and the average for the country is 1.5 percent”.
Dr. Adis said the report was misleading and called on media stakeholders to crosscheck from the PHCs across the state.
It would be recalled that it was erroneously reported that no fewer than 30 children have been confirmed dead, while more than 2,000 are currently receiving medical attention in various medical centres across Nasarawa State as a result of acute malnutrition and diseases that hit the state in the past three months.