Good diet can prevent malaria in children

Well fed children would be happyGood food is like a good drug for those who know. Children need to be given adequate diets in order to be healthy. Sade Oguntola writes on the need for parents to give their children balanced diet in order to guard against malnutrition and ward off certain diseases, including malaria.

Mothers may be doing their children a lot of favour by giving them foods rich in Vitamin A, selenium and zinc because they are supplements that can protect children from having malaria, especially the severe malaria that can leave your child with poor intelligences.

Common food items such as mango, potatoes, carrot, lettuce and oranges abound in the market and are rich in these vitamins and elements. Malaria is caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes; it kills more than 1 million people every year and makes 300 million seriously ill.

In Africa alone, a child dies from malaria every 30 seconds and there is yet no effective vaccine against malaria that could save people from developing it or its severe complication.

However, experts, studying the problem that is more prevalent in children and pregnant women, suggest that a good diet can help prevent malaria in children going by the fact that a substantial proportion of malaria-related sickness and death among children are related to deficiencies in diet.

According to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, those deficiencies in dietary iron, zinc, vitamin A and folic acid appear to increase the threat that malaria poses to children’s health. These vitamins and minerals are important to the human body’s immune system, but are often scarce in areas where malaria is common.

The researchers estimate that zinc and vitamin A deficiencies in children under five may each be responsible for about 20 per cent of malaria deaths in that age group every year — a total of nearly 400,000 deaths. Ninety per cent of the deaths due to vitamin A deficiency are in Africa, they say.

The team, led by Laura Caulfield, an associate professor, at the school’s Centre for Human Nutrition, reviewed data from Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, and found a strong link between malnourishment and the likelihood of malaria being fatal in children under the age of five.

Even mildly malnourished children were twice as likely to die from malaria than children who are not under nourished, and moderately malnourished children were four times more likely to die. For children with severe malnutrition, the risk of death from malaria was nine times greater than in those who were well nourished.

The research published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene suggested that being well nourished enables children to mount a strong immune response and beat the infection.

Several scientists have also corroborated the role of eating right if the effect of malaria in children is to be curtailed. Based on the study, “Effect of vitamin A supplementation on morbidity due to Plasmodium falciparum in young children in Papua New Guinea: A randomized trial,” in the Lancet Journal in 1999 revealed that there would be a considerable reduction in the number of times a child will have malaria if he/she is under a vitamin A supplementation.

Another in The Internet Journal of Tropical Medicine far back in year 2006 pointed out that even when the child has malaria, vitamin A’s combination with iron supplements considerably improved the effectiveness of its treatment, thus making the child recover faster.

The study of the effects of vitamin A and iron supplementation was among Cameroonian 132 preschool children aged between 6 months and 6 years and when the deficiency of vitamin A and iron was corrected in these children with malaria, there was a remarkable improvement in ability to recover from malaria.

Experts have alsotraced the benefit of vitamin A to its ability to inhibit the development of Plasmodium falciparum, the germ responsible for malaria, under laboratory conditions, they said in the 2004 edition of the journal Experimental Parasitology.

Vitamin A and iron supplements do not only help to reduce the deficiency caused by plasmodium, they also facilitate the restoration of the haemoglobin level as well as the production of red blood cells, resulting in the improvement noted in children receiving iron supplementation.

Meanwhile to get the best effect, taking iron and vitamin A together has the greatest effect. Vitamin A improves the absorption of iron in the intestine, thus helping to fasten the process of blood formation required in the fight against anaemia in infants as well as in pregnant women.

Though there is yet the need for further researches to optimise the use of vitamin A and other micronutrients in the treatment of malaria, the researchers, however, recommend to everyone living in malaria endemic region a usual consumption of food sources of these micronutrients as papaya, yellow potato, carrots, yolk and liver, considering the virtues of vitamin A and iron in the malaria prevention and treatment.

Dr. Owusu Agyei, director, Kintampo Health Research Institute, Ghana said the fact that deficiency in micronutrients such as vitamin A, zinc, iron, and folate are responsible for a substantial proportion of ill health and deaths due to malaria has been studied in several African countries and found to be true.

While malaria often afflicts populations that are both impoverished and malnourished, and a large portion of the burden of malaria falls upon the most vulnerable within the population, children and pregnant women, he said a variety of interventions are definitely required to combat malaria, including insecticide-treated bed nets, environmental control and prompt, appropriate treatment of malaria cases.

According to him, there exists no single solution or programme to combat malaria, rather a comprehensive approach is required with concurrent interventions on many levels, including ensuring that people eat well.

Nutrition plays a major role in maintaining health, and malnutrition appears to generate vulnerability to a wide variety of diseases and general ill health. In a case where a child is undernourished, he or she may be unable to mount an appropriate immune response to the malaria parasite due to the already lowered immunity.

Equally having a diet rich in zinc or zinc supplementation is helpful. Zinc deficiency has also been hypothesized to aggravate malaria because it is required in ensuring good immune response to infectious diseases.

Studies that investigated the relationship between zinc status and malaria also showed a protective effect of zinc supplementation. In the Gambia, 110 children who received 70 mg of zinc supplementation twice a week for 15 months had 32 per cent fewer malaria-related clinic visits than did the placebo group.

A randomized trial in Papua New Guinea involving 274 found a 38 per cent reduction in clinic visits for malaria in the group that received 10 mg of elemental zinc supplementation six days a week for 46 weeks compared with a placebo group. Zinc deficiency is ultimately preventable with adequate support.

Current intervention strategies focus on zinc supplementation, fortification of locally acceptable foods and dietary modification to consume greater amounts of animal products and fewer fiber and phytates.