KARACHI: Has the country made any progress on its dismal indicators relating to the nutritional status of women and children, food security and household water quality over the past six years?

This important question will be answered through a countrywide survey planned by the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination in collaboration with the Aga Khan University (AKU) and Unicef.

This is the second such survey since the 2011 National Nutrition Survey, which presented a bleak picture of Pakistan’s status on woman and child health and related areas. One of the key survey findings were: 44 per cent of children were found stunted, too short for their age and more than half of all households were found either hungry or faced threat of hunger.

“Poor nutrition in the crucial early years triggers irreversible mental and physical defects that have a lifelong impact on a child’s productivity and immunity against disease and earning capacity as an adult,” Dr Atif Habib, assistant professor at AKU’s department of paediatrics and child health said at a ceremony held on Monday at the university for the formal launch of the National Nutrition Survey 2018.

‘Malnourished mothers are more likely to have underweight children’

According to him, malnutrition also has a vicious, multi-generational impact since malnourished mothers are more likely to have underweight children.

“This survey will analyse Pakistan’s progress on a variety of fronts that influence nutrition and will enable us to design targeted interventions to boost the health of our young women and children. It will also highlight barriers to adequate food intake and nutrition-related health status,” he said.

The survey would be conducted district-wise to have better insight into the health challenge, he added.

Worst nutritional status

Cristina Brugiolo representing Unicef, Sindh, noted that the survey data would help Pakistan develop evidence-based initiatives to achieve targets under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals which call on countries to end all forms of malnutrition by 2030 and to address the causes of preventable deaths in newborns and children.

“The scale of the problem (in Pakistan) necessitates the need for regular monitoring as good nutrition lays the foundation for healthy and thriving communities and nations,” she observed.

Citing data on Pakistan’s nutritional status, Professor Iqtidar Ahmad Khan of AKU’s division for women and child health said the country had some of the worst malnutrition rates in South Asia and progress to address social determinants over the last several decades had been very slow.

“The results of 2011 survey were alarming and showed that Pakistan is one of the 10 countries where more than half of the population is affected by malnutrition in the form of both under and overweight.

“One-third of all children are underweight, 44pc are stunted and more than 15pc are wasted, half of them are anaemic and almost one-third of these children have iron-deficiency anaemia.”

On malnutrition among women, he said that the phenomenon was widely prevalent in women of productive age and the 2011 survey also pointed to immense deficiencies of micro-nutrients among women.

Dr Baseer Achakzai, director nutrition wing at the health ministry, said that the 2018 survey would be the largest [such] survey in the country. It would help the government assess how the country’s nutritional indicators had changed following the introduction of provincial nutrition support programmes and some province-led initiatives such as the Benazir Income Support Programme.

Findings from the survey are also expected to shed light on the impact of the 2011 decision to devolve the subject of health from federal to respective provincial governments.

The survey will be conducted in all provinces and regions in all districts of Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, Islamabad, Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.

It will gather information from 115,500 households, with field teams going door-to-door in villages, towns and cities across the country. The data to be collected includes blood and urine samples which will highlight the presence of key minerals for growth and good health; height and weight measurements to detect development delays; and an assessment of the state of household drinking water quality and sanitation facilities which can cause illness and malnutrition.

Field teams will also collect information on household income, gender empowerment, education levels, and breastfeeding practices which are known to have an impact on nutrition indicators.

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics and the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources are also acting as technical partners in the survey, which will complete in 13 months.

Other speakers at the event included Dr Salman Kirmani, chair of the department of paediatrics at AKU, Dr Sher Baz from the health ministry, Dr Iftikhar Mallah from Sindh health department and Dr Naveed Bhutto from Sindh Nutrition Support Programme.

Published in Dawn, February 13th, 2018