Malnutrition

TLAHUITOLTEPEC, Mexico -- She looks healthy now, laughing among two dozen other children in a rescue center run by Roman Catholic nuns. But when 8-year-old Catarina Hernandez arrived here, her belly was bloated and her legs swollen with water -- the final stage of malnutrition.The condition is so close to starvation that it normally appears only in times of famine, but Sister Alicia Estrada, who runs the center, says the nuns see it routinely. In the lush hills that surround this village in southern Mexico, hunger is day-to-day normality.

Our favorite new bracelet isn't made of sterling silver. Dainty charms don't dangle prettily from it; there are no jewels to catch the light. The Bracelet of Life is just a strip of paper -- but it sure catches attention.Its colored zones make it a handy tool for doctors helping out in global crises, from droughts to civil wars. Here's how it works:Doctors slip a bracelet on a child's arm and quickly see how close that child is to starving. Wrap the bracelet around the arm of a well-nourished child, slip the tab through its slot and pull, and the tab stops on the green zone.

WASHINGTON -- Every serving vice president since Alben Barkley in 1952 who has wanted his party's presidential nomination has gotten it. Al Gore wants his party's, so it is not too soon to be depressed. And inquisitive. Herewith some questions for him.You say that abortions should be "safe, legal and rare." Why do you care if they are rare? In Roe v. Wade, which you adore, the Supreme Court said a fetus is, unlike crab grass, only "potential" life. That makes it easy for you to defend even partial-birth abortions.

When you picture Iraq, what do you see? Visions of Saddam Hussein? Hidden containers of anthrax and nerve gas? Scud missiles on alert?Having visited Iraq last spring, this is what I see: dignified Muslim women begging on Baghdad street corners; young boys hawking cigarettes and kerosene to help support their families; a father running with his child into a hospital emergency room because there are so few functioning ambulances; a middle-aged man with diabetes...

A 23-year-old Baltimore woman was found guilty of second-degree murder and child abuse yesterday in the starvation death of her 5-month-old daughter last year.Porthingia Johnson of the 1700 block of Aliceanna St. told police she woke up on March 20, 1994 to find her daughter Alicia lifeless. She said she held the dead girl for two days before the father, Michael Johnson, returned to the apartment after being away for two weeks.Johnson said she didn't know the girl was undernourished, according to her police statement.

OCOSINGO, Mexico -- The people of this village in the middl of the lush Lacandon Jungle live in huts of dried branches with few modern conveniences. Until a little more than a year ago, they confronted illness and disease in the way of their ancestors, with prayer and magic.But that's changed now in Ocosingo, as it has in scores of other places all over Mexico. This place now has a government-funded, state-of-the-art hospital. In the year since it opened, villagers say, they have seen remarkable progress in their fight against disease and malnutrition.

London. -- No famine, no war, no flood, no earthquake has ever claimed the lives of 250,000 children in a single week. Yet malnutrition and disease claim that number of the world's children every seven days. That is the first consideration.The second, as UNICEF's newly published ''State of the World's Children'' makes plain, is that for a mere $25 billion it would now be possible ''to control the major childhood diseases, eradicate polio, halve child malnutrition, bring clean water to all communities, provide a basic education for every child, and make family planning available to all couples.

MOSCOW -- Veterans of Nazi prison camps are meeting veterans of Communist prison camps here this week.Many are white-haired, bent, aged. Others are not so old, and haven't been out so very long. All had suffered at the hands of the century's two great totalitarian systems.A few -- like 69-year-old Yevgenia Wrubletskaia -- had known both."I was in both hells. There was no difference between them," she said.These were regimes built on cruelty, humiliation and death.But a theme that was voiced strongly at the conference's opening session was that the German totalitarian past is safely buried while Russia's is not."

The photos of tiny children, with bellies swollen and arms an legs pathetically thin, show the misery of Somalia. What they can't show is that many, even with emergency help, will be forever scarred by the famine that grips their country.Aid workers say 300,000 people have died so far; the total could reach 500,000 by the end of the year.Relief agencies are feeding 3.2 million people a day, but a third of the population of 6 million remains threatened by starvation. And the youngest generation -- children under 5 -- could be wiped out in some places.

Dear Dr. Solomon: I've just finished reading an article that deals with malnutrition, and I felt I had to write to you. The article says that malnourished people can be found among all of us, regardless of our economic status. What do you think? -- Sanford, Richmond, Va.Dear Sanford: I don't know the article to which you refer, but I believe you may be confusing malnutrition with calorie intake. A person can have an adequate or even an above-average calorie intake and still be malnourished if the diet is not well balanced and if it does not provide the nutrients needed for good health.

A report released last week shows that obesity is harming the health of millions of Americans, including children and teens. The report, "F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America 2009," from the Trust for America's Health, says that 28.8 percent of Maryland youths ages 10 to 17 are overweight or obese - and thus at increased risk of a long list of chronic health problems such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis and some cancers....

In the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, it's relatively easy to spot the youngsters suffering from malnutrition. They're the ones with the glassy eyes, toothpick arms and legs, and rags for clothing. But in Baltimore, hunger presents a different face: an overweight adolescent in T-shirt and jeans, or a sickly infant who turns up repeatedly in hospital emergency rooms. City health officials are taking the problem of malnutrition seriously, as food and fuel prices soar and more families lose homes and jobs.

O'Malley defends reasons for firing Gov. Martin O'Malley rebutted yesterday a former state worker's claims that he was fired for political reasons. Nelson Reichart, the former head of real estate for the Department of General Services, filed suit this week, contending that he was terminated in a purge of white Republicans from the agency. Reichart also said his firing was in retaliation for comments he made to The Sun about a Queen Anne's County land deal. The governor said privacy protections in personnel law prevent him from going into detail about the firing, but he said Reichart's accusations are untrue.

Dr. George Gordon Graham, an internationally acclaimed authority on malnutrition in infants and children and founding director of the division of human nutrition in the department of international health at what is now the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, died of respiratory failure Sunday at his Gibson Island home. He was 83. Born the son of a banker in Hackensack, N.J., Dr. Graham was 4 when he moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico. When he was 14, he left San Juan, and entered the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1941.

YANJI, China - At 16, Myung Bok is old enough to join the North Korean army. But you wouldn't believe it from his appearance. The teen-ager stands 4-foot-7, the height of an American fifth- or sixth-grader. Myung Bok escaped the Communist North last summer to join his mother and younger sisters, who had fled to China earlier. When he arrived, 14-year-old sister Eun Hang did not recognize the scrawny little kid walking up the dirt path to their cottage in a village near the North Korean border.

For years, doctors have turned the conventional wisdom about the dangers of high cholesterol on its head when it comes to the many thousands of people on dialysis. Despite the general acknowledgement that high cholesterol is a risk factor for heart disease and strokes, data have suggested that dialysis patients with high cholesterol have lower death rates than others with supposedly "healthy" blood-lipid levels -- prompting many physicians to refrain from treating dialysis patients with drugs such as statins that can bring cholesterol down.

Dr. Maria Simonson, who created a health, weight and stress clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, died Wednesday at her Westminster home of complications from a stroke. She was 83. Co-author of the book The Complete University Medical Diet, she ran a multidiscipline weight-loss program at Hopkins and was a health and stress consultant to airlines and other industries until retiring about 15 yeas ago. Born Maria Day in Shanghai, she was raised in Turkey and Greece where her father, a U.S. Navy admiral, was posted.

Peter Hermann's article on getting aid to Palestinians illustrates that conflict begets food insecurity, and that food insecurity begets the malnutrition occurring in Gaza and the West Bank ("Getting U.N. aid to Palestinians a struggle in itself," Jan. 2). Data collected in June 2002 by Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, with technical support from Johns Hopkins University, showed that 7.8 percent of children under age 5 from 1,000 West Bank households studied were acutely malnourished, and 11.7 percent were chronically malnourished.

KARMAIYA, Nepal -- The talisman tied above the entrance to Harsha Bahadur Bot's house is a bundle of rice, the flawed foundation of life in the plains of Nepal. Rice sculpts the landscape into diked squares of green or gold. The diesel pop-pop-pop of the rice mill is the sound of a village from afar, its beating heart. Rice is the basis of every meal, and a family's supply is bank account and insurance policy rolled into one. That the grain has the power to conjure good or ill seems obvious to Bot, 45, a farmer and fisherman.

She faints. She coughs. She recovers. She faints. She coughs. She dies. Oh, and her frailty inspires lust in the man who revives her. They fall in love. Her name is Mimi, and, as the heroine of "La Boheme" takes to the stage in the Baltimore Opera's performances of Puccini's 19th-century opera, some in the audience can't help but ask a few technical questions. For instance, why is Rodolfo hanging around Mimi as she wastes away in the final death scene? Doesn't he realize she's contagious?