Talk:Malnutrition

300 Hindi words article on malnutrition in growing age

300 Hindi words article on malnutrition in growing age 2402:8100:27FA:5AC2:0:32:FE6E:4501 (talk) 15:11, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Mortality claim is wrong; I'm planning to remove

The 'Mortality' subsection of the 'Epidemiology'section begins with the following, nearly all of which is a (presumably translated) quote from a French book by Jean Ziegler, L'Empire de la honte.

Mortality due to malnutrition accounted for 58 percent of the total mortality in 2006: "In the world, approximately 62 million people, all causes of death combined, die each year. One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished and according to the Save the Children 2012 report, one in four of the world's children are chronically malnourished. In 2006, more than 36 million died of hunger or diseases due to deficiencies in micronutrients".

This seems almost certainly wrong.

• Hunger or malnutrition don't show up in the top ten leading causes of global mortality (WHO), even in the section for low-income countries.
• It's prima facie incompatible with other sections of this page, eg 'It is estimated that nearly one in three persons globally has at least one form of malnutrition', citing WHO. Note that this includes overnutrition issues like obesity.
• It's also highly implausible, although not strictly impossible, that malnutrition would account for 58% of total mortality if, as the quote also says, only one in twelve people is malnourished.

My intention is to come back and remove that claim, replacing it with a more accurate one if I can find a better source (I haven't yet found one; malnutrition is listed in many places as a leading cause of death for children under 5, but I haven't found statistics on its contribution to the overall mortality rate). I'm adding this to the Talk page and waiting two weeks in case someone chimes in with evidence that the claim is correct. eggsyntax (talk) 21:04, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Does Wikipedia have a position on whether each death has exactly one cause, or whether a death can have multiple causes? Can a person die of both tuberculosis and malnutrition? Jaredroach (talk) 13:42, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Not that I've seen, although I haven't gone looking at this point. Certainly there can be issues with multiple categorizations of cause-of-death, as we saw with disagreements about how many died from COVID-19. I do read 'Mortality due to malnutrition accounted for 58% of the total mortality in 2006' (emphasis mine) as identifying malnutrition as the primary cause of death.

If there's evidence that 58% of deaths have malnutrition as a substantive-but-not-primary cause, I'd recommend rewording but not removal. It seems unlikely to me that that's actually the case, though, although I'd of course look for more definitive evidence either way before actually editing. eggsyntax (talk) 14:20, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Some more info:

- Our World in Data, drawing from WHO data, gives the rate of death from malnutrition in 2006 as 4.5 per 100,000, which adds up to about 300,000 deaths from malnutrition altogether.

- This Unicef report gives the number of people facing catastrophic food insecurity in 2023 as 705,000; extrapolating back to 2006 based on the Our World in Data chart, that suggests about 1.2 million in 2023.

- The same report shows about 36 million experiencing phase 4 food insecurity in 2023 (conceivably this is where the current source was drawing from? Or it could very well be coincidence). This phase is described as 'Households face large food gaps, which are either reflected in high acute malnutrition levels and excess mortality or mitigated by use of emergency coping strategies, which may entail households selling their last breeding animal or their land or house.'

Having been unable to find sources that give figures anywhere near the current content, I'm going to go ahead and remove the claim later this afternoon. eggsyntax (talk) 17:22, 26 October 2024 (UTC)