PESHAWAR: The number of malnourished children is rising in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as a survey carried out in 2002 showed that 50 percent babies in the province were facing food shortage. Speaking at the press conference on Saturday, Pakistan Paediatric Association President Dr Irshad Ahmed, representative of the Unicef Dr Abdul Jamil, Dr Ayeen Khan Afridi and Planning and Development Department (P&D) Consultant Muhammad Iqbal Khan and Dr Zia Muhammad urged the government to notify November 20 as babies food shortage day. They said the United Nations had been observing the day since 1954. They also informed that 47 percent children were suffering from various physical problems including shorter height at the age of five. Death ratio in one thousand babies of less than one month is 54 percent while in less than one-year-old babies it is 74 percent, they added. The health experts said that 6.6 million babies had no access to clean water and every year 53,000 babies died of diarrhea. They said the survey had shown that the number of out-of-school children from 5 to 17 years of age would be 1.6 million in the province who included 40 of the girls in this age category. They also urged the parents to give full attention to the food, breast-feeding and other facilities to their children.
