Health officials in Ghor province say that in the last seven months, at least 15 children have died because of malnutrition and more than 480 other children suffering from malnutrition have been taken to the Ghor provincial hospital.
These officials say that they see an alarming rise in the number of children lacking proper food and nutrition in the last seven months of this year compared to 2021.
Abdul Ahmad Nouri, head of Ghor Provincial Hospital, confirmed the data to Zan Times. “Since March, 15 children have died due to malnutrition and 484 other children have been diagnosed with malnutrition. In the 12 months of last year, this figure was 506 cases and 28 deaths due to malnutrition,” he explains. And these are just the cases registered at that hospital.
Nouri says the main factors for such an increased level of malnutrition are the unprecedented increase in unemployment, consecutive droughts, and poverty.
Mastora brought her two-year-old child from the Dolina district to the Ghor hospital for treatment. “My child became so thin and weak last year,” she says. “We took him to the district clinic; it didn’t work. They said to take him to the city, so we brought him here. He has been under treatment for the last three nights, but he still hasn’t gotten better.”
Mastora, a 37-year-old mother of three, attributed her child’s malnutrition to poverty, saying that her husband cannot support their living expenses through his work as a farmer. She says that if there are no changes in their lives, she believes that all three of her children will suffer from malnutrition.
Malnutrition is a crisis across Afghanistan. Child malnutrition cases in Afghanistan have shot up by 47 percent in the first nine months of 2022, says Save the Children in a new report that was released at the end of October. It tracked the number of “dangerously malnourished children admitted to Save the Children’s mobile health clinics” between January and September. At the start of 2022, the aid charity admitted 2,500 malnourished children a month for treatment at 57 clinics; in September, that number had shot up to 4270, according to the report.
