Infant mal-nourishment in Indonesia

Question: Discuss a global health issue infant mal-nourishment in Indonesia. Answer: The World Food Programme estimates that around 13 million children suffer from Malnutrition. In some of the Indonesian districts about 50 percent of the younger children are underweight. Some parts of Indonesia have worse statistics than most of the other under developed countries. Child malnutrition affects almost 36% of the Indonesian community with increased ill-health. UNICEFs research has proved that people in Indonesia have poor eating habits. Most of the children eat rice with water which is surely a malnutrition aspect which is increasing in the country. These feeding habits teamed up with poor breast feeding ability of the mothers have given rise to the increased number of deaths within the children in Indonesia. The lives of many children in thousands can be saved if the mothers would breastfeed them at least for the 1st 8 months of the childs lives (Anon 2008). Most of the mothers have realized the importance of breastfeeding and this percentage has gone up by 7 8%. One solution is to get the mothers taken iron supplements during their pregnancy. The Health Ministry has taken up an initiative to work on the data base by looking into the various reasons like unfertile land which could not produce so much of food for the locals and the increased levels of poverty (Brennon 2013). Some of the best ways to curb this is by increasing the health campaigns the rural communities and by increasing the behavioral awareness programs especially for the women to educate them on the households, maintaining families, nutrition for children and health care for their entire families and themselves. References Anon (2008). Reversing the ravages of child mal-nutrition (online), https://thejakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/archive/reversing-the-ravages-of-child-malnutrition-in-indonesia/ accessed on March 27th 2015. Brennon, J (20013). Indonesia Child Malnutrition aggravated by Food and Oil Prices (online), https://www.irinnews.org/report/79350/indonesia-child-malnutrition-aggravated-by-food-oil-price-rises accessed on March 27th 2015.