About one in three people around the world are not getting enough vitamins and minerals, lowering the IQ of nations, contributing to the death of one-million children a year and leading to mental impairment in 20-million babies, a United Nations report said on Wednesday.
Its authors called on companies to fortify foods with nutrients missing from diets in developing countries and to provide supplements through low-cost tablets, capsules and syrups for children, and women of child-bearing age.
The ”ubiquitous” shortage of vitamins and minerals ”debilitates in some significant degree the energies, intellects and economic prospects of nations”, the report said.
Health dangers included diarrhoea, pneumonia, anaemia and blindness. Tackling diseases such as malaria, measles and parasitic infections was also essential be cause of impaired absorption of the few minerals and vitamins that did find their way into diets.
There needed to be concerted global action to ensure the UN met its targets of eradicating extreme poverty, improving maternal health and reducing child deaths by two-thirds by 2015, the report said.
Some significant gains have been made by adding iodine to salt and supplying vitamin A capsules to young children in more than 40 developing countries, but more had to be done.
”Resources and technology to bring vitamin and mineral deficiencies under control do exist,” said Venkatesh Mannar, president of the Micronutrient Initiative, who wrote the report with Unicef.
Effects on health and intelligence because of shortages were huge. ”In many countries the children are very slow to react and it is due to these deficiencies,” he said.
But getting vitamins to people was not easy. – Guardian Unlimited Â