If we can eliminate malnutrition in Haiti’s children, we’ll make a world of difference | Opinion

Imagine an 11-year-old boy named Evens.

Now imagine what he would look like if he weighed only 23 pounds, about the same weight as a healthy 1-year-old. Whatever you are picturing is not likely as terrible as the skeleton Evens had become — the severity of his malnutrition was incomprehensible, even to experienced medical providers.

Unfortunately, Evens is not unique among the many malnourished and starving children I have seen as a veteran of more than 40 medical trips to provide complex care to Haiti’s children. Evens and those like him are the predictable and increasingly frequent result of Haiti’s repeated crises. In fact, the World Food Programme estimates that almost half of Haiti’s 11.5 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity.

This number will surely grow as year-over-year food and fuel inflation is currently greater than 50% and 25%, respectively. A friend from Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s second-largest city, messaged me recently that he paid $30 for one gallon of gasoline to fuel his motorbike to deliver a $40 bag of rice to his orphaned nephew.

This is a generational crisis as children, like my friend’s nephew, are at the highest risk for malnutrition and its lifelong physical and mental harms. The number of children under 5 suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Haiti doubled last year, according to UNICEF. Along with that, the number of hospital admissions for severely malnourished children significantly increased. At Hôpital Sacré Coeur in Milot, a small town 11 miles south of Cap-Haïtien, highly skilled Haitian pediatricians and nurses, and my medical teams provide care for severely malnourished children with increasing frequency.

In Haiti, childhood malnutrition is mostly “kwashiorkor,” a protein deficiency characterized by thin limbs with open sores and a swollen belly. It results when children are fed sugary drinks and carbohydrate-rich foods, like plain rice, because these are far less expensive than the beans and meat they really need.

It is striking to see toddlers with their skin falling off and legs so swollen they cannot walk. The sadness in their eyes is eclipsed only by the sadness of their parents who have no good options. Infants are in even more dire shape because a mom with no nutrition cannot make breast milk. Accurate mortality data are difficult to obtain because of poor reporting mechanisms, but many of these children die. Even those who improve in the hospital with protein supplements are almost always discharged to the same food-insecure environment from which they came.

Through no fault of their own, each child suffering from malnutrition and dying from starvation in Haiti is in this situation because of decades of natural and man-made disasters. Global humanitarian aid peaked with the January 2010 earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince and left more than 300,000 people dead. However, the world’s response to each subsequent disaster carries diminishing enthusiasm — a symptom of so-called “Haiti fatigue.” Why help a country where corruption, theft and gangs often pilfer donations before they reach those who need them? How can one person have an impact on a crisis that is so vast?

These are valid questions. However, we can’t allow starvation to be the new normal.

Hunger is dealt with most effectively in the community and home, where it starts in the first place. Make no mistake, new and ongoing efforts to redevelop Haiti’s agriculture and food industries are critical, as more than 50% of Haiti’s food is imported. But that effort will take decades. In the meantime, nutritious food needs to be widely available at little to no cost to Haiti’s needy families.

To that end, my colleagues at Hôpital Sacré Coeur and Holy Name Haiti Health Promise, the U.S.-based foundation that supports the hospital, teamed up on an initiative called “Feed Haiti.” This collaborative pipeline begins with U.S.-based logistical support for U.S.-based community-funded volunteer food-packing events.

The pipeline ends with Haiti-based community distribution of millions of nutrient-fortified meals to families in Milot and the surrounding communities. As the young program grows to include events in cities across the United States, increasing supplies of beans and other ingredients grown by local Haitian farmers are combined with the packaged meals on arrival in Haiti. The hope is that all the ingredients can be sourced in Haiti someday.

We are under no illusions. This initiative is merely a drop in the bucket in helping to alleviate malnutrition and starvation in Haiti. So, one might ask: What difference does it make? For the hungry child who gets a nutritious meal tonight, it makes a big difference.

Please visit our website and help make that difference: https://www.classy.org/event/dc-feeds-haiti/e409325.

Rob Freishtat, M.D., MPH, is chief biotechnology officer & Connor Family Professor in Research and Innovation at Children’s National Hospital. He is professor of pediatrics, emergency medicine and genomics and precision medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.