malnutrition in ei tu ta

it is late at night and i'm analyzing data for our donor reports - not the most exciting reason to be looking at numbers, but informative nonetheless.

in the last few months we helped start a feeding program for malnourished children. the program screens children for malnutrition and then referrs them into the feeding programs if they are deemed moderate or severe. one of the areas the program operates in is called ei tu ta, which is an idp camp on the burmese side of the border. the camp was set up a few years ago for a maximum of 1,000 burmese people that had to flee their villages, and now houses over 4,000.

this number isn't necessarily reflective of the general population because the screening wasn't randomly selected. rather, people came to the clinic for screening and thus there's likely some self-selection bias at hand. HOWEVER, nearly 9% of the children under five that showed up were malnourished.

children under five year old malnourished, going to bed hungry every night, for the sole reason that their government denies them access to food supplies, burns their crops, and forces them to flee to overcrowded camps where there aren't enough resources to go around. burma used to be the world's largest exporter rice for chrissakes.

my idealism levels are particularly low right now... on to the reproductive health data.