Experts at a programme in Sylhet on Saturday said unawareness among the guardians about proper feeding of infants and young children was the main cause of child malnutrition in the country.
Poverty is not the main cause of malnutrition among a large number of children in the country, because a high level of under-nutrition prevails among the children of solvent families that include middle, mid-upper and higher class families, they observed.
It is possible to give a balanced diet to a child from the everyday foods of a family if the mother and other guardians have the awareness of child’s food, they said.
Resource persons said this at a divisional orientation programme for journalists styled ‘Effective reporting on infant and child nutrition’ held at a city hotel.
The Management and Resource Development Initiative, in association with Alive and Thrive, a United States-based non-government organisation, Save the Children and Unicef organised the programme.
The experts, referring to data of the Institute of Public Health Nutrition, said forty per cent of the total children in the country were suffering from malnutrition.
But the number of under-nutrition infants and children can be reduced on a wide scale through developing awareness of proper feeding among the guardians, they added.
A good number of pediatricians very often prescribe foods marketed by different multinational companies as the nutrition issue is not included in the medical curriculum in the country.
Professor Md Asirul Hoque, head in the community nutrition department of Bangladesh Institute of Health Sciences, Tina G Sanghvi, senior country director of Alive and Thrive, and Farid Hossain, bureau chief of AP, among others, were the resource persons in the programme.
