CLEFT MALNUTRITION
Dr. Prasanthkumar Nellickal
CSR and Sustainability Leader | Social Impact Catalyst | Communication Strategist
As per statistics, one in 700 child birth in India is a cleft. Alongside the genetic and other causative factors, malnourishment of mother is another reason for cleft. One or two among 10 such kids with cleft doesn't survive to their first birthday due to various challenges.
Malnourishment plays a critical role there too. Some of these kids become severely malnourished mainly of various reasons. Primarily, they are not able to eat/drink properly due to their physical challenges. And specifically the new born babies to whom mothers milk is the only source, their suction capacity compared to normal children are much less and it reduces their intake to 20-30%. For toddlers, esp those having severe palate cleft, parents find it difficult to feed the kids due to fear of choking. Secondly, many families don't have the means to cater the nutrition requirement of the kid due to their poor living conditions where they can't afford to any such nutritious diet or provide any supplements.
When do medical screening (thanks to the resourceful partnership of Mission Smile with Muthoot Pappachan Foundation) for our smile missions to provide free cleft surgeries to kids, it became a major challenge (and still is) that many of these kids who report to us are turning out either with low hemoglobin or low body weight. Surgery can't be performed in such cases where we have to wait until they gain health, meeting the criteria to receive surgeries. Also there are number of new born babies being brought to our screening camp by parents, seeking advice on how to take care of the baby, esp how to feed them and how to handle them in difficult situations.
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We learned it in such a hard way as there were reports at the initial stage of our smile initiative on losing few kids where we found an intervention was high time in saving the lives of such kids. Thereon we started the Nutrition scheme for severely malnourished kids from the cleft cases reported to us across the country (from our mission states). Apart from distribution of supplements on annual basis (thanks to the Muthoot FinCorp branches for their supports), we orient mothers on the techniques on breast feeding without causing choking for the baby, issue special feeding bottles for the cleft affected babies, make the family aware on hygiene aspects, guide them on the affordable local resources to be included in diet (for both baby and lactating mother) etc. The issue is much large and what we are touching is just a tip of the ice berg.
The picture included here is taken from our recently concluded Smile Mission at Kakinada (Andhra Pradesh, July 2023) which is given with parental consent and it is used only for representing the issue of severe malnourishment among cleft affected kids.