Health
Nigeria’s malnutrition epidemic needs COVID-19-level response — HEI
The Executive Director of the Health Emergency Initiative, Pascal Achunine, has called for an urgent national response to tackle Nigeria’s growing malnutrition burden.
He said that the country should treat the crisis with the same level of seriousness it accorded the COVID-19 pandemic.
Achunine stated this on Wednesday while speaking on Inspiration 92.3FM’s Wellness Wednesday on the topic “Malnutrition in Nigeria: Breaking the Cycle Through Awareness, Prevention, and Action.”
Achunine said malnutrition had become an epidemic in Nigeria, noting that inadequate attention to the problem could have devastating consequences for the country’s future.
Already, about two million Nigerian children suffer from severe acute malnutrition, with only two out of every 10 children affected reached with treatment.
The United Nations Children’s Fund says malnutrition is a direct or underlying cause of 45 per cent of all deaths of children under five.
Speaking further, he explained that malnutrition extends beyond a lack of food, stressing that many people mistakenly associate the condition only with undernutrition.
“Malnutrition is a condition where the body does not get enough nutrients to develop, grow, and stay healthy.
“Malnutrition is not only about undernutrition. Undernutrition means you don’t have enough food or you don’t have access to adequate meals and nutrition.
“But there’s also overnutrition, where a person may eat so much, yet the diet lacks the required balance.
“So, you can have a child who is very fat, but that child is still not getting proper, balanced nutrition. That is also malnutrition,” he said.
The HEI ED described Nigeria’s nutrition situation as alarming, saying the country was facing a widespread malnutrition epidemic that required immediate national intervention.
“Our situation in Nigeria is very peculiar. If I am to make a national decision currently, the sort of attention we gave to COVID-19 is the kind of attention we need to give to the malnutrition epidemic in Nigeria. There is currently an epidemic of malnutrition across the country,” Achunine stated.
Citing recent data, he expressed concern over the high proportion of Nigerian children affected by malnutrition, particularly those under the age of five.
“If we have a country where, based on recent UNICEF publications, 35 per cent of children are currently malnourished, and in some states the figure is as high as 51 per cent, while in others it is over 40 per cent or in the high 30s.
“And many states do not even publish their figures because they do not want it to appear as though they are not doing well, denying the fact does not wish it away.
“We are facing an existential threat as a country. The attention being given to children aged zero to five who are currently malnourished in the country is still very low, and that is dangerous. But we need to talk about the dangers malnutrition poses to health,” he said.
Achunine lamented that many Nigerians were unaware of the magnitude of the problem and warned that failure to act decisively could have long-term consequences for the country’s development.
“What is painful is that many people are unaware of these realities. The people listening to this programme today are the people who will shape Nigeria over the next 15 to 20 years.
“If we do not address this problem with the same seriousness that we addressed COVID-19, we will pay dearly for it,” he said.
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