This is what a study covering the period 1990-2022 published by The Lancet indicates.
Sri Lanka ranks second worse after India, but the latter shows an improvement in recent years. The Ministry of Health is considering “food baskets” for those suffering from moderate acute malnutritio
Girls and young women in Sri Lanka are among the most underweight in the world, suffering from a form of malnutrition and living conditions that put their very survival at risk, this according to a study covering more than 30 years (from 1990 to 2022) published by the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet on 29 February.
The research confirms the persistence of the food emergency that Sri Lanka’s recent crises have not certainly improved. The island nation is, in fact, second only to India for dangerously underweight girls aged 5 to 19. More than 410,000 or 16.4 per cent of the total age group are malnourished or underweight.
The study looked at Body Mass Index (BMI) to determine if a child is underweight, classifying them as stunted, wasted or both.
The data on wasting is significant because this process risks endangering a child’s very life, too thin for their height and with weak immunity.
In the long run, this can cause problems to or delays in development, and, in the case of severe wasting, increase the risk of death.
The research is the work of the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, a global network of health scientists in cooperation with the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Nutrition and lifestyle specialists Damayanthi Ranatunga, Senarath Mudalige, and Dhanushka Liyanage told AsiaNews that “being underweight is weighing less” than the average of one’s age and height cohort.
The “child may be stunted or wasted, or living with both conditions which endanger his or her life from childhood to adulthood.” Most children who “are underweight, wasted or stunted” because of “inadequate micronutrients, the result of undernutrition.
