Study Says Pregnant Women in India Are Gravely Underweight
NEW DELHI — Her first child survived eight months before succumbing to pneumonia; her second was stillborn; her third, delivered in a rickshaw, gasped for an hour before dying.
When she got pregnant for a fourth time, Juhi, a woman from a South Delhi slum who uses only one name, was spotted by a local health worker and taken to a mobile clinic. A doctor diagnosed severe anemia, gave her iron pills and begged her to eat more.
Juhi listened, and gave birth to a boy, Muhammad Sultan, who has survived his first birthday — a huge milestone in a country with about one-sixth of the world’s population but one-third of all newborn deaths.
“My in-laws were telling me they would get my husband married to someone else, because I couldn’t have a healthy baby,” Juhi, 26, said in an interview. “That’s why we left our village. But now my mother-in-law is happy with me.”
The poor health of children in India, even after decades of robust economic growth, is one of the world’s most perplexing public health issues.
A child raised in India is far more likely to be malnourished than one from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe or Somalia, the world’s poorest countries. Poor sanitation and a growing tide of drug-resistant infections also affect nutrition.
But an important factor is the relatively poor health of young Indian women. More than 90 percent of adolescent Indian girls are anemic, a crucial measure of poor nutrition. And while researchers have long known that Indian mothers tend to be less healthy than their African counterparts, a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesdemonstrates that the disparity is far worse than previously believed.
(More from The New York Times)
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