Malnutrition

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.

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.

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.

As adults grow older, proper nutrition is often threatened by diminishing appetites and a host of factors, including ill-fitted dentures, depression, confusion and chronic disease. A coalition of health care experts, including the American Academy of Family Physicians, recently reported that an estimated 40 percent of the nation's 2 million nursing home residents aren't getting the nutrients they need. And it is thought that about half of them were malnourished before they even arrived at the homes.

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.

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.

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?

THIS promises to be an especially patriotic Fourth of July, overflowing with words and images of America triumphant.But I am in a kind of internal exile from my country. I am a dissident in late 20th-century America, at odds with the patriotic majority and deeply suspicious of my own government.America is the country of my birth, whose history I have taught and whose ideals I cherish. Yet, I cannot celebrate this national festival withy fellow citizens.My nation disgraced itself in the Persian Gulf war. I watched my country go to war against a backward, minor power in order to restore an oppressive, autocratic monarch to his medieval throne.

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...