Donate to Vitamin Angels…

Posted By elissa on Dec 27, 2010 | 1 comment

… and Marine Nutraceutical will match your donation through the end of 2010.

Vitamin Angels is a non-profit charity group that works to reduce childhood mortality worldwide by distributing micronutrient (vitamin and mineral) supplements.  According to the Copenhagen Consensus Center, micronutrient supplementation is…

…the top development priority out of more than 40 interventions considered. Specifically, vitamin A supplementation for children (every 4 – 6 months, from age 6 months to 5 years) and therapeutic zinc supplementation for diarrhea (10 – 14 days of supplementation, up to the age of 5) were considered. Vitamin A supplementation can reduce all-cause mortality for children 6 – 59 months by 23%, and several studies suggest that therapeutic zinc supplements for diarrhea can reduce diarrheal mortality below the age of five by 50%.

In a 2009 editorial, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof referred to micronutrient deficiencies as “The Hidden Hunger“…

Yet one of the great Western misconceptions is that severe malnutrition is simply about not getting enough to eat. Often it’s about not getting the right micronutrients — iron, zinc, vitamin A, iodine — and one of the most cost-effective ways outsiders can combat poverty is to fight this “hidden hunger.”

Malnutrition is not a glamorous field, and so it’s routinely neglected by everybody — donor governments, poor countries and, yes, journalists. But malnutrition is implicated in one-third to one-half of all child deaths each year; the immediate cause may be diarrhea, but lurking behind it is a deficiency of zinc.

“That image of a starving child in a famine doesn’t represent the magnitude of the problem,” notes Shawn Baker of Helen Keller International, a New York-based aid group working in this area. “For every child who is like that, you have 10 who are somewhat malnourished and many more who are deficient in micronutrients.

“Lack of iron is the most widespread nutrition deficiency in the world, and yet you can’t really see it,” he added.

I kicked in $25.00. How about you?

(via The Benninger Blog)