“How sweet! She looks so healthy with her chubby cheeks!”
Sometimes malnutrition is easy to spot– a three month old clocking in at only 3 pounds, her ribs prominent, her crying only consoled by a bottle of milk that she quickly consumes.
But in other cases, malnutrition can be very difficult to detect to the untrained eye. Clothed and standing on a scale, a child can sometimes meet all the criteria to be deemed ‘healthy’, but through skillful assessment and observation, you can gain a more accurate picture of what is going on ‘beneath the surface.’ This type of malnutrition is silent and insidious and is claiming the lives of many children here in remote Guatemala. Hope of Life is fighting daily to reverse the statistics.
So, heads up… NERD ALERT. This purpose of this blog post is to give a little bit of medical perspective to what we see and treat daily here in Guatemala. Today, I am only focusing on the two types of acute malnutrition we treat most often here in rural Guatemala– Marasmus and Kwashiorkor.
Continue reading Measuring Malnutrition
