TO ADULT eyes, eating dirt is disgusting. Nonetheless, young children do it routinely. How harmful the habit truly is has never been established. But Mduduzi Mbuya and Jean Humphrey of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, who work with children in Zimbabwe, think it can be very harmful indeed. They suspect, as they write in Maternal and Child Nutrition, that in places like Zimbabwe, where chickens roam freely and what is on the ground is thus full of their droppings, it is responsible for stunting infant growth.
One child in five is so afflicted. And stunting’s effects are not merely physical. Stunted children also do badly at school, affecting both their own futures and those of the countries they live in. Solving stunting, however, is not merely a question of better nutrition. A study on food programmes carried out in 2008, by Kathryn Dewey and Seth Adu-Afarwuah of the University of California, Davis, concluded that even the most effective of these led to a reduction in stunting of only 30%. Stunting, then, has other causes as well.
Searching the literature, Dr Mbuya and Dr Humphrey found that two pertinent...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1NPeU1t
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