Does location matter? A study of malnutrition amongst Ethiopian children
Each month a paper is selected by one of the Editors of the five Nutrition Society Publications, and this month the paper selected is by PhD Candidate Seifu Hagos.
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Hagos' study has been published in Public Health Nutrition and is entitled: ‘Local spatial clustering of stunting and wasting among children under the age of 5 years: implications for intervention strategies’.
The Nutrition Society's ‘Paper of the month’ is a monthly feature, whereby a recently accepted paper from a Society journal, published on Cambridge Journals Online is made freely available for a limited period. Each paper is accompanied by a blog post from the author. The five journals in the Nutrition Society are: the British Journal of Nutrition, Public Health Nutrition, Nutrition Research Reviews, Proceedings of the Nutrition Society and Journal of Nutritional Science.
Hagos is writing on the Cambridge Journals Blog:
As malnutrition is a major public health problem in Ethiopia, we aimed to find out how the acute and chronic forms of undernutrition occur in the districts and kebeles (a kebele is the smallest administrative unit in Ethiopia). Such knowledge could be helpful in improving our understanding of the distribution of undernutrition on a local scale, as well as designing targeted nutrition intervention programmes.
For this purpose, we surveyed children aged less than five years, who were found in 1744 households. We measured children’s height, weight, and the geographic locations (latitudes and longitudes) of households. Using data from 2371 children aged less than five years of age, we evaluated how malnutrition is distributed within a district and kebeles.
