Keeping animals out of home key to improved nutrition

Keeping animals out of the home may improve childhood nutrition and reduce instances of stunting, according to a study undertaken in a Gambian village.
 
The study analysed 230 children of Gambian staff living at the Medical Research Unit in rural Keneba between 1993 and 2009. The staff included scientists, physicians, laboratory technicians and support staff, such as cleaners. The population was chosen because of its diversity of wealth, education housing conditions and access to free health services.
 
“Not surprisingly, those with the lowest socio-economic scores had the shortest, most stunted children, and the gradient wasn’t as big as we’d expected,” says co-author Andrew Prentice, a professor of international nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “The group at the top, however, had the widest variation.”
 
Half of children in this upper grouping lived in Western-style housing with running water and flushable toilets, and they kept animals out of the home. The other half lived within the village without similar amenities.
 
Comparisons of these children showed that those living in Western-style houses grew well, with no incidents of stunting or underweight. Children in the village fared less well, with below average height and weight.
 
According to the 2017 WHO Africa Nutrition Report, 58.5 million children suffered stunting –being too short for one’s age –in 2016. The WHO global targets include a 40 per cent reduction in the number of low-weight-for-height children under five years old by 2025.

Animals in the home can be disease carrier

Keeping animals such as poultry, which can be disease carriers, free range in the home can contribute to childhood diseases that exacerbate malnutrition, Prentice explains. “We speculate the key issue to combat malnutrition is piped water and keeping animals out of the home,” he says.

The research, which was published in BMC Medicine on the 1st  November, was limited to the Gambia.

Annotating the study, Doug Mombert, a doctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, says that context and culture vary significantly across the Africa continent, which needs to be taken into account when making policy decisions around animal husbandry and smallholder farming.

Nonetheless, policymakers would benefit from integrating the study’s findings into their policies and implementation plans, Mombert says, to “better articulate and address the intricacies of water, sanitation and hygiene in various contexts”.

“Targeted research on the governance of WASH – water, sanitation and hygiene –  in relation to health-related outcomes is imperative to address the burden of child undernutrition,” Momberg maintains.

(SciDevNet/wi)

Reference:
Mayya Husseini and others: Thresholds of socio-economic and environmental conditions necessary to escape from childhood malnutrition: a natural experiment in rural Gambia (BMC Medicine, 1 November 2018)
bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-018-1179-3