Update from the IUNS 20th International Congress of Nutrition
If you are participating with a poster to the IUNS 20th International Congress of Nutrition in…
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Update from the IUNS 20th International Congress of Nutrition
If you are participating with a poster to the IUNS 20th International Congress of Nutrition in…
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Postdoc in nutrition for the WASH benefits project
Position: Postdoctoral Scholar in Nutrition
Deadline to Apply: July 1 or until filled
Start date: August 1, 2013
Location: Kenya
The Program in International and Community Nutrition at the University of California, Davis seeks a qualified applicant for…
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Patrick Awuah: Educating a new generation of African leaders
Patrick Awuah makes the case that a liberal arts education is critical to forming true leaders.
Aft…
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Interview with Francis Zotor, President of the African Nutrition Society
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Double Burden of Disease by Ricardo Uauy
Highlights of "Double Burden of Disease" by Ricardo Uauy at the 78th #NNWI
Highlights of the presentation of Ricardo Uauy at the 78th Nestlé Nutrition Institute Workshop in Muscat, Oman. March 2013. For the complete presentation and the Q&A, visit: http://ow.ly/jdcTH
[video id="aNujejrZqdU" type="youtube"]
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How feeding practices affect height, weight and disease in infants in emerging countries
Presentation by Benjamin Yarnoff (Health economist in RTI’s Public Health Economics Program) on feeding practices and their effect on height, weight and disease in infants in emerging countries. (78th Nestlé Nutrition Institute Workshop, Muscat, Oman.…
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Feeding the City
Urban agriculture is seen as an important element in the urban food system, contributing to urban…
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Nutrition leadership in Africa: making the change
Only a small number of truly exceptional international leaders have emanated from Africa. One of these is the South African Nobel Prize winner, Nelson Mandela. In reality, Africa is poorly led and most African countries still carry the burden of…
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Mendeley, the reason I changed my referencing software
Over the years of my academic life, I used many reference managers, mainly EndNote and Zotero. I…
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Editors and Contributors needed!
Nutrition Leaders for Africa is looking for active Editors and Contributors.
If you are interested…
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Over the past years, the World has witnessed the power of Social Media channels. Blogs, Twitter and Facebook have never been more used than during the “Arab spring” in 2011 or during the French and US presidential elections in 2012.
Not only in politics, social media were also widely used in Humanitarian emergencies response; “Haiti allowed us to glimpse into a future of what disaster response might look like in a hyper-connected world” said Paul Conneally, public communications manager for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and leader in using digital technologies for humanitarian aid.
Raising awareness
Raising awareness about world hunger, that is the purpose of Universities Fighting World Hunger (UFWH) which is an initiative by University students that started the “Why Care campaign” in 2012 to challenge people and make them think how hunger could affect them and the reasons that we should care about hunger. This initiative gained a lot of endorsement, especially in North America, through twitter and facebook. They didn’t raise money or food for the hungry, they simply asked people to send their own photos and a message about the reason they care about hunger, in other words, they asked for commitment which can be even more useful for their future campaigns.
Empowering Nutrition Leaders
Lately, some nutrition professionals, activists and advocates have become aware of the importance and power of the social media channels; a 2011 campaign started by a Kenyan Twitter user, Ahmed Salim, gained some popularity among internet users using the Twitter hashtag #FeedKE; a similar campaign, Kenyans for Kenya, raised over US$8 million through corporate sponsors and Mpesa, a mobile phone money transfer service run by telecoms firm Safaricom [IRIN News]. The movement Scaling up nutrition (SUN), is another good example of an initiative that gained support through social media.
Don’t wait… tweet!
Unfortunately, many talented and very active nutrition leaders (especially in Africa) conduct interesting actions and have the biggest impact on their communities but are nonexistent online, lectures and conferences are still the only (and rare) occasions for many of these actions to be acknowledged. ”Do good and throw it into the sea” is a proverb that shouldn’t be applied here, if an initiative does good in some random population or community, broadcasting it would have even more impact on people living the same struggle.
The 5th African Nutrition and Epidemiology Congress (ANEC V) was held in South Africa at the University of Free State in Bloemfontein from October 1-4. The Congress was jointly organized by the African Nutrition Society (ANS), the Nutrition Society of South Africa (NSSA) and the Association for Dietetics in South Africa (ADSA). ANEC V was an opportunity to gather nearly 1500 delegates from universities, industries, UN agencies, and representative of NGO’s from Africa and all over the world. The theme of the congress was “Transforming the nutrition landscape in Africa”.
More than 175 plenary or parallel sessions lectures were provided. Nearly 240 posters were displayed. Interestingly, all the fields of human nutrition were covered: from hunger and food insecurity to micronutrients deficiencies, metabolic diseases, maternal and child health, and genetic patterns in human nutrition.
Professor Anna Lartey during the opening session exposed the situation of Nutrition in Africa and urged all the stakeholders to double the efforts needed to empower for a better nutritional future in Africa. The congress pointed the success in fighting micronutrient deficiencies in Africa with positive results regarding especially iodine deficiency disorders and vitamin A and iron deficiencies. In, many African countries, iron, vitamin A and iodine deficiencies have subsequently decreased. The success is supported by the supplementation of vulnerable groups especially lactating women and by the fortification of staple foods in micronutrients. For example in South Africa, there is virtually no goiter observed since the implementation of the salt iodization. However, some delegates brought innovative and local research results with enormous success in the fight against micronutrient deficiencies. The use of phytases or some local plants and seeds significantly reduced deficiencies in many African countries. For example in Kenya, a study pointed out that when culturally accepted, the consumption of bovine blood reduced the anemia in school-age children.
While on the continent visible and hidden hunger are decreasing, African countries are experiencing a nutrition transition, exhibiting an increasing of non communicable diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and respiratory symptoms. Salt has been suspected to promote hypertension and some debates at the congress concerned the level of iodine and the international recommendation of salt consumption. Participants also described the evolution of non communicable diseases in Africa and called for a quick and early response to the situation. More research is needed to understand the trends of diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases and strokes in Africa.
Jane Badham during her plenary speech urged African countries to join the “Scaling Up Nutrition” SUN movement and to put on a higher level nutrition in the development programs. In order to convince government, the process of joining the SUN movement was explained.
Regarding the communicable diseases, AIDS/HIV still threatening millions of people on the continent and a good nutrition should be combined to the effort of the ARVs to improve their efficiency. At a parallel session dedicated to HIV and infections, recommendations were
made to bring nutritional support and advices to patients especially when they develop specific symptoms such as diarrhea and weakness.
Finally, there were discussions regarding ethics in Nutrition. The issue turned around the registration of dialecticians and nutritionist of a country in order to support them. However Magda Slabbert explained that registration should be an initiative of nutritionists and they should not been obliged.
As a complement to the congress, master classes were offered as trainings to excel in Sports Nutrition, How to evaluate a scientific publication, Nutritional therapy of renal diseases, Nutrigenomics, Health promoting schools, Dietary methodology, Food security and the Training on the management of severe / acute malnutrition.
Survey Toolkit for Nutritional Assessment
The Survey Toolkit for Nutritional Assessment was developed by CDC’s International Micronutrient Malnutrition Prevention and Control Program (IMMPaCt) to provide epidemiological support to countries to assess and monitor the elimination of micronutrient malnutrition. This toolkit provides a set of resources collected from many sources, including public health specialists from the CDC and other agencies. New tools have been created where gaps existed. The toolkit provides:
Public online access
A search function that enables the user to identify the tools needed for a specific task or to work through the stages of survey planning and implementation step by step
Examples of how the tools have been used in the field
A collection of resources that will be updated as research and best practices evolve
The toolkit can either be used as a stand alone resource or in conjunction with the CDC/Micronutrient Initiative manual,Indicators and Methods for Cross Sectional Surveys of Vitamin and Mineral Status of Populations, which is also included in the manual module of this toolkit.
(via Ending Hunger Now)
(via Tristram Stuart: The global food waste scandal)
Nutrition leaders initiative for Africa
The least that can be said about nutrition issues in Africa is that they are challenging. A lot of effort is spent and a lot of NGOs and programmes are working together in order to improve the actual status of nutrition in the continent. Two of those initiative are the‘African Nutrition Leadership Programme’ (ANLP) and the ‘Programme de Leadership Africain en Nutrition’ (PLAN), both programmes share the same perspective of improving nutrition by forming leaders that can initiate a change, improve and sustain.
It is usually asked if these kind of programmes are really effective, although, delegates of both programmes attest of their great benefit on the individual basis, we can’t know for sure the importance of their impact on the general landscape of nutrition in Africa.
Nutrition Leaders for Africa is an initiative to share personal experiences that could inspire or set an example in improving nutrition by following the activities of the alumni and the change they make in their surroundings. This initiative aims also to connect both programmes alumni as they share the same objectives, and allow them to share experiences and advices.