Explain the Consequences of Malnutrition?

Malnutrition manifests itself in terms of illness and death in all age groups. Children, pregnant women, nursing mothers and elderly are particularly vulnerable to the effects of malnutrition. Let us closely look at the effects of Malnutrition in children. Malnutrition contributes to more than half of child deaths worldwide. Fifty-six percent of deaths among pre-school children in the developing world are due to the underlying effects of malnutrition on disease, but conventional methods of classifying deaths by cause have misleadingly attributed only about five percent of child deaths to malnutrition.

The risk of death rises as the grade of malnourishment increases among children from mild to moderate to severely malnourished. It was previously thought that only severely malnourished children were at increased risk of dying, but recent studies show that even mild and moderately malnourished children are at increased risk of death because of their poor nutritional status. On an average, a child who is severely underweight is 8.4 times more likely to die from infectious diseases than a well-nourished child. Children who are moderately underweight and mildly underweight are 4.6 and 2.5 times, respectively more likely to die than well- nourished children. It is estimated that the vast majority (83%) of all malnutrition related deaths worldwide occur in children who are mildly and moderately underweight because of their total number. Programmes directed only at treating severe malnutrition, therefore, will have only a minor impact on child mortality rates.