Number of malnourished children growing

Fully clothed, 11-month-old Sher Mohammad looks like a normal child. But as his mother removes his shirt, his bones are visible and it's clear he is malnourished and in desperate need of rapid sustenance. "I could not feed him with my own milk and I feel like I am to blame," his malnourished mother, Nafisa, told IRIN in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. She had resorted to feeding him on bread and a few vegetables now and again, but was now attending a feeding centre with her child in the desperate hope that her son would become healthy. The UN children's agency UNICEF estimate that every second child in Afghanistan is currently moderately to severely malnourished. "The economic situation is bad here. They have suffered for years so the problem of malnutrition is high," health coordinator for the Afghan NGO, Hewad, Dr Abdul Salam Taleb told IRIN. Of the three supplementary feeding centres run by Hewad, some 700 children have been registered as malnourished. Taleb said there was also a chronic problem of malnutrition in other eastern provinces such as Laghman, where 450 malnourished children were registered in a clinic there. There are very few health facilities in the province of Nuristan, a mountainous region that is difficult to access. "There are also two or three districts in Kunar province which have no clinics or doctors and people are just left to die," he explained. Further exacerbating the problems of food and healthcare is the fact that many NGOs had left the eastern region due to insecurity there, an aid official told IRIN. At the Hirsashahi camp some 10 km from Jalalabad, another 500 children are registered as being in the same condition. "There are a large number of patients we cannot help," Taleb said, adding that an estimated 20 percent of children in Jalalabad were undernourished. Save the Childen say that one in every four Afghan children will die before their fifth birthday. Most women are ignorant of recognising health problems and are therefore unable to detect the condition in children until it shows physically, he explained. "We are also providing health education in this area," he said, employing up to five people educating others at feeding centres who also make home visits. The clinics are supported by WFP, which provides mixed food for those in need. Over the past six months, Taleb said about seven child patients had died. "We believe this number to be much higher," he maintained, saying that an estimated 12 percent of children in the province die from hunger. "We want to set up another five to six clinics in rural areas which are being neglected, particularly in the border areas. But we need funding for this," he added.