Lack of height boards in Region 8 contributes to stunting - NNC

TACLOBAN CITY, April 17 (PNA) – Lack of height boards in many Eastern Visayas villages is a major setback in fighting stunting of children in the region, the National Nutrition Council (NNC) said on Monday.

The NNC is still consolidating 2016 nutritional status reports from local government units as many areas failed to monitor reports of children’s heights as required in the globally-accepted Child Growth Standards (CGS), said NNC regional nutrition program coordinator Catalino Dotollo.

“Sometimes, reports don’t tell us the real picture because the coverage for measuring height is below 80 percent. If there is no height included in the report, we have to return the report to the local government,” Dotollo said on Monday.

Local government units are mandated to conduct the "Operation Timbang Plus", the annual weighing and height measurement of all preschoolers 0-71 months old or below six years old in a community to identify and locate the malnourished children.

Data generated through monitoring are used for local nutrition action planning, particularly in quantifying the number of malnourished and identifying who will be given priority interventions in the community.

The official said stunting among children is serious in the region. Based on the 2015 Food and Nutrition Research Institute National Nutrition Survey, 4 out of every 10 children five years old and below in Eastern Visayas are stunted.

“Growth failure is irreversible after 1,000 days of life. We cannot give interventions such as supplementary feeding and other sectoral programs to curb stunting,” Dotollo explained.

To fight stunting, the NNC asked local government officials to acquire height boards to measure growth of children.

The Department of Health and NNC provided steel rules in some local government units in the past years and urged local officials to fabricate the wooden board.

The NNC regional chief noted that some towns have only one height board being shared by all villages. The agency has yet to come up with number of villages without height boards.

The World Health Organization-recognized CGS is now the “single international standard that represents the best description of physiological growth for all children less than five years of age.” (PNA)
SARWELL Q. MENIANO