Posted on 08/30/2011 7:14:49 AM PDT by tellw
Vitamin A supplements to malnourished children worldwide could save 600,000 young lives a year, says study with strong Canadian connections that challenges the politics behind the controversial program.
“This is a fundamental human rights issue,” bioethicist Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta told the Star on Monday.
“I think further studies exposing large numbers of children are unethical,” he said.
In 43 studies from 18 countries analyzed by Bhutta and his team, children given placebos rather than Vitamin A capsules were at 27 per cent higher risk of dying from diarrhea and suffered 50 per cent more cases of measles and far more night blindness.
Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death for the 8.8 million children worldwide who die each year before their 5th birthday.
Indeed, the Canadian government has actively supported the global effort launched in the 1980s to dose children up to age 5 with capsules of Vitamin A after the award-winning meta-analysis of the vitamin’s benefits by Dr. George Beaton of the University of Toronto.
Megadose capsules are now distributed in 60 countries, nearly doubled in the last 12 years.
“The evidence was robust then when Dr. Beaton did his study and it is as robust as ever,” said Bhutta, an Aga Khan University professor on a year-long sabbatical at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
“There is no more need to do studies. But a lot of skepticism remains. Our major reason for doing the study was to see if there is any truth to that skepticism.”
Published in the British Medical Journal, the study analyzed tests involving 215,633 children given synthetic oral Vitamin A. Studies involving food fortification (countries such as Guatemala now add Vitamin A to domestic sugar production) or beta carotene supplements were excluded.
Skeptics and critics argue children in poor countries would be better with a diet rich in locally grown palm oil rather than capsules financed by Western governments and distributed by UNICEF, a United Nations organization.
In his homeland of Pakistan and in India, where anti-intervention with Vitamin A supplements is strong, dwindling support for the programs has caused spikes in vitamin deficiency and a rise in related illness, he said.
The Indian antipathy “does stem from the fact that it is a U.N. agency,” he said. “A study will not silence critics. But we’re thinking of countries in Africa where the need is great.”
As well, aid activists are alarmed by genetically modified food such as rice grown with a high Vitamin A content.
GM rice is “one of a whole range of things that we have to do,” said Rockefeller Foundation chief executive Gordon Conway, whose institute finances the research. “We have to supplement, we have to increase the range of foods that people eat.”
“Some high-up people in U.N. agencies, government aid agencies and non-government organizations have gained status, fame and power” by pushing the Vitamin A agenda, Dr. Michael Latham of Cornell University wrote last year.
He advocated breastfeeding, measles vaccination, parasite deworming in children, better sanitation and local education as lasting solutions.
Vitamin A capsules “should not be taken as a panacea for all kinds of food insecurity and poverty underlying these issues,” Bhutta agreed. “But it is a highly effective way of getting it into children.”
Those who didn't get vitamin A died of diarrhea.
Yet, there are political types who continue to object to vitamin A supplements in pill form.
WOW!!!!
Are they Khali worshippers or what.
I’m a great believer in vitamins. We ttok them and my kids took them and my grandkids NOW take them.
Well which is it we want? Cruel indifference, or unsustainable overpopulation?
In that the person quoted suggests other solutions, it could be that he has seen the destruction caused by UN programs.
You see the problem educated Indians have ~ some are quite willing to ignore their educations where that conflicts with their devotions ~ while others will push the science.
The way we can figure out the actors in the continuing intellectual conflict in India is to see who's killing the kids.
We've got a case here.
You can just imagine how brutal it's going to get in the future when they are technologically well enough advanced to worry about sanitary milk and milk byproducts.
I am currious as to who the “we” is in the statement “We’ve got a case here.”
All that is provided in the article is a statement by a person who advocates natural foods and is distrustful of the UN. Without further information, I hesitate to judge him on this particular issue, regardless of his religion. Maybe he is a worshiper of Kali and eats out of moneky skulls, like in the Indiana Jones movie. Or maybe he is a guy that you wouldn’t mind as a neighbor. Too little data.
Dirty little secrets of medical research.
You will still find medical researchers who, in a private moment, will admit that the data collected by the Tuskegee syphilis studies and the work of Dr. Mengele was “highly useful”.
Don’t tell Bill Gates of the Zero population crowd.
I have neighbors like this. They don’t trust “pills that are manufactured”. Somtimes they have good reasons for that, and frankly, I wouldn’t trust pills from a local apothecary anywhere outside the United States.
Wouldn’t feeding these people be better than giving them vitamin supplements? “Here, kid, take this vitamin. It won’t fill your belly, but it’s better than nothing.”
I know, I know...There’s a famine. There’s been a famine for decades.
Where’s the British Empire when you need to teach backward people how to take care of themselves?...i.e. feed themselves, dig a latrine, wash their hands, wash their genitals, not defecate in the water supply, etc, etc, etc. Some people need to be managed or else they’ll simply die.
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