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“Malnutrition in all its forms can have terrible consequences for a child’s life,” Dr. John Egbuta, UNICEF Nutrition Officer, says. “A malnourished child gradually loses all his/her energy and is then predisposed to diarrhea, acute respiratory infection and measles. Also the physical and mental development are affected.” Doctor Bashir-ur-Rehamn, the hospital’s Chief Executive Officer says, “Malnutrition is a public health problem and the TFC was urgently needed here…UNICEF has helped us to make this happen.”

© UNICEF/PAKA01695D/Zaidi

Shazia, 13 months, is severely malnourished and given therapeutic milk by her mother.

One of seven patients currently in the TFC, Shazia Bibi is 13 months old. On being admitted her weight was 4.4 kgs. (The ideal weight for a child of this age is 10-15 kgs.) After just two days of caring and therapeutic feeding Shazia has gained a whole 0.2 kgs.

Shazia was referred to the TFC from the ICRC tent hospital, where her mother, Jalila, had taken her to join other children in the same condition: weak and suffering multiple infections.  Sitting by Shazia’s side, Jalila tells how she has five more children waiting at home and says, “I worry about them. My husband is working, but we lost our house in the disaster and now we are living with other relatives. I know my children at home also need me.”

Jalila’s description of how Shazia started to lose weight once she was weaned from exclusive breastfeeding at age of seven months shows clearly how lack of food and inappropriate breastfeeding put children in the first months their life at high risk.

Before the earthquake struck Pakistan last year, the national breastfeeding rate was 93 percent. In the earthquake-affected areas of the country it has gone down in recent months though, as the trauma of deaths and illnesses, the difficulties of displacement, the inadequate food supplies have impacted on many women’s ability to maintain exclusive breastfeeding for their infants. For Jalila, learning about Shazia’s malnourished status does not come as a surprise as she recognizes that all her children have lost weight, but the older children show more resilience and have recovered better than the baby.

“In our rural communities the levels of poverty and illiteracy also affect children’s nutrition” says one of the TFC nurses, Ulfat Sajjad, “A woman who has not benefited from education may not know how to take care and feed her children.”

To redress this, UNICEF is supporting the Ministry of Health to open 50 supplementary feeding centres in villages nearby over the next 3 months. “Identification and treatment of underweight children in their own villages will help us to reduce cases of severe malnutrition” Doctor Egbuta explains.

NOTE.  Despite care and therapeutic feeding, Shazia couldn’t combat pneumonia.  She was transferred to a hospital in Islamabad and now she is struggling for survival.