Sindh province, hit hard by last year's floods, is suffering levels of malnutrition almost as critical as Chad and Niger, with hundreds of thousands of children at risk, Unicef said on Wednesday. A survey conducted by the provincial government and the UN Children's Fund revealed malnutrition rates of 23.1 percent in northern Sindh and 21.2 percent in the south.
Those rates are above the 15 percent emergency threshold set by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and are on a par with some of the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Northern Sindh also had a 6.1 percent severe acute malnutrition rate and southern Sindh had 2.9 percent, both far above the WHO thresholds.
"We are looking at hundreds of thousands of children at risk," Unicef chief of communication Kristen Elsby told Reuters. A full report would be released on Friday by the Sindh government, she said, along with the province's response plan. Elsby said it was unclear if the August's floods had caused a spike in malnutrition, but that it had revealed the extent of the problem because babies and mothers were being screened for the first time. "People were already vulnerable and this kind of kicked the chair out from under them," she said.