Acute malnutrition reported among children

Some 12.6 percent of children under the age of five years in parts of southern Mauritania suffer from acute malnutrition, according to a study released this week by World Vision, an international non-governmental organisation. The three-week survey was carried out among more than 3,600 children in the region of Assaba, which borders on Senegal, and the adjoining region of Tagant. In Aftout, a district in Assaba, the acute malnutrition rate was 14.1 percent - double the national average of seven percent, it found. World Vision nutritionist François Batalingaya, who headed the survey, said his team had expected Tagant, a particularly barren, isolated area, to be the worst hit, but the rate there was 10.9 percent. "We realized that most of the severely malnourished children had probably already died," Batalingaya said. Further studies revealed that 36 of the surveyed community's 1,824 children had died in the last six months. "I have never seen people literally living in the sand like this," Batalingaya said. "I wonder how they even survive." Mauritania has been hit by its worst drought in at least two decades, but there has been little international attention for the plight of its children, World Vision said. "No doubt the international community is focused on the famine in Southern Africa," Batalingaya noted. "Somehow this region has been overlooked. There is competition for funding and West Africa is losing." The next harvest in Mauritania is not until October 2003, according to World Vision. "We know that the situation will deteriorate by February when all food stocks are depleted," Batalingaya said. "Then we'll also face aggravating factors such as more diarrhoea cases and epidemics like measles. The number of children under five who are dying will increase. Now is the time to intervene. If we don't, three months down the road we will be forced to do a mass food distribution."