Infant & Mother Health in Nepal's Arsenic Areas

Measuring Day (May 2018)

baby, baby boy, baby girl

The second Measuring Day was met with mixed emotions by most of the baby crowd. The feeling of sitting in a swing was unsettling to say the least by the majority, as you’ll see in the photos. Decidedly, the most fun of the day was playing with the measuring tape.  (see photos and text in attached pdf)

Several years ago during one of our Arsenic Awareness Workshops, we found two children with hydrocephalus. One young boy in Nadawa, who is now 7 years old, we helped with a stint operation, but the other child, a one year old girl, was in a district that was too dangerous to return for two years. Sadly, the young girl died during that time. This has made our Nutrition Team more aware of the importance of monitoring the children’s growth and identifying problems abnormalities in the early stages. Tracking weight gain or loss over 2 years will also help spot children who may have a medical problem. These parent can be referred to the local clinic and hospital for followup examination.

Grandmothers, aunties, and older siblings are frequent care takers when mom isn’t available. We encourage all the caretakers to attend workshops, thus, assuring nutrition and health care information is spread amongst the community.

                                                                     WHO Guidelines for Weight Growth  (Chart 1)

0-3   Months--       Gain of 175 g to 210 g per week

   5    Months---     Most babies should have doubled their birth weight by 5 to 6 months

6-12 Months--       Gain of 400 g per month

1 Years                 Most babies have tripled their birth weight.

2 Years                  4 Times the birth weight

3 Year                    5 Times the birth weight

5 Years                  6 Times the birth weight

7 Years                  7 Times the birth weight

10 Years               10 Times the birth weight

(see weights in Chart 2 in attached pdf)

Thoughts

Holding one workshop with a couple follow up sessions during the weighting times may not be enough contact with the women. We’ve found ten children that are under weight from this group that need more frequent follow up with the Female Health Volunteer (FHV). The FHV can check the mother’s nutrition status, child’s health stats and provide more training for the family, especially in nutrition. With this in mind we will use extra funds to work with the FHV and the mothers on a monthly basis.

http://www.who.int/childgrowth/standards/Technical_report.pdf?ua=1

https://www.infantchart.com/ (infant weight calculator)

http://www.who.int/nutgrowthdb/about/introduction/en/index4.html

• Report June 2018 (PDF)
  

March 2018 Update

School Desks for Jotpur
Last year when we visited the local primary school in Jotpur to check out the rooms for our Nutrition and Community workshops, we found the Kindergarten and First grade class rooms lacked desks. The children were sitting on burlap bags on the cold cement floor. The teachers didn’t have a desk, table or cabinet for their teaching materials. Also walls in these rooms weren’t painted like the upper grade rooms. In the back of one classroom there were broken wooden windows and desks piled up (see below). My hope was that we would be able to improve the children’s classroom. Thankfully, this month (March) we will start mending and building new desks for the class rooms. (see photos)
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Sano Kunwar Baby Weighting and Follow up workshop in April.
Our FFF team decided to hold a follow up workshop during the Baby Weighing in April. The objective is to determine if the women made any changes to their families diet after the workshop, and to see how many followed up with the recommended immunizations. The female team will help the women fill out a one page survey. We also are interested in any difficulties the women faced in trying to implement the diet changes. The instructors will also review the Children’s Growth Chart with the women, to help them check their babies growth or lack of growth.

• Photos (PDF)