The starvelings: Hunger has an even bigger impact on children's health than was thought

from The Economist

BADAAM lives in the Indian province of Rajasthan. Tetanus killed one of her children in infancy; another is weak from diarrhoea, caused probably by the custom of keeping mother and baby isolated for a month after birth. Yet she is one of the lucky ones: a charity, Save the Children, has been keeping her family alive with food and nutritional advice.

Unicef, the United Nations' children's agency, said this week that fewer than 10m children died before their fifth birthday in 2006—probably the lowest rate ever, and certainly the smallest number since records began in 1960, when twice as many under-fives died, out of a world population half today's level.

Good news—but it could have been still better. Malnutrition is by far the biggest contributor to child mortality, present in half of all cases, says the World Health Organisation. New research in the Lancet, a British medical journal, suggests it may be one of the “big bills left on the sidewalk”—to borrow the phrase that Mancur Olson, an economist, used for describing easily reaped but neglected benefits.

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