Word: hungering
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Against this gloomy backdrop, about 1,000 delegates from some 100 nations and a dozen international organizations are gathering in Rome this week for the World Food Conference, sponsored by the United Nations. It will be the first concerted global effort in history to confront the problem of hunger. For twelve days, the delegates will discuss both a program to provide food for the starving and a drive to mobilize technological and financial aid from the wealthy industrial and oil-exporting states to help the 100 poorest nations increase their own food output. Also certain to be discussed...
Nearly half a billion people are suffering from some form of hunger; 10,000 of them die of starvation each week in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There are all too familiar severe shortages of food in the sub-Saharan Sahelian countries of Chad, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Upper Volta and Niger; also in Ethiopia, northeastern Brazil, India and Bangladesh. India alone needs 8 to 10 million tons of food this year from outside sources, or else as many as 30 million people might starve...
Starvation is only one of the ways in which hunger kills. People whose bellies are full can still die of malnutrition if their diets lack certain essential elements. Lack of the proteins containing essential amino acids-found in milk, meat, fish, beans and nuts-can bring on kwashiorkor, a wasting disease that kills tens of thousands of children each year in Africa, India, Southeast Asia and parts of South America. Kwashiorkor victims, whose tissues are usually swollen with fluid, develop a scaly rash and liver troubles. They are most easily recognized by the characteristic that gave the disease its Ghanaian...
Most adults can come close to starvation and survive. Hunger strikers and concentration-camp inmates have been pulled back from the brink of death with carefully measured supplements of essential nutrients. Though survivors of concentration camps tend to die sooner than their contemporaries, their deaths-or health problems-are rarely a direct result of near starvation, but are caused by old injuries or tuberculosis and other infections...
...cannot take place in the fetus if the mother is malnourished, and it cannot be accomplished in the infant if he is starving. Nor will it happen later. In many cases, brain development that does not occur when it is supposed to does not take place at all. Thus hunger is condemning countless thousands of infants-from Harlem to the Sahel-to the twilight zone of mental retardation, and leaving them no hope of deliverance...