Nutritional status of children one year after the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake in Nepal

Details

Supervisors

Guha-Sapir, Debarati ; van Loenhout, Joris ; Wallemacq, Pascaline

Faculty

Faculté de santé publique

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de la santé publique

Abstract

Background: Child undernutrition is one of the major causes of morbidity and mortality in low income countries and can potentially be enhanced by complex emergencies. The aim of the study was to investigate the nutritional status of under-five children living in earthquake affected area after one year of Nepal earthquake 2015. Methods: It was retrospective study by using Nepal Demographic Health Survey 2016 data. A total of 11,473 households were selected for the sample. NDHS 2016 studied a total of 2,491 children under age 5 years were eligible for height and weight measurements from the subsample households. In this study 2409 valid data set was used. The anthropometric indicators (height-for age, weight-for height, and weight-for-age) were analyze. Among them 645 children were from earthquake severely affected, affected regions. Crosstabulation, Spearman’s correlation and logistic regression were performed to statistical analysis. Results: The under nutrition in earthquake severely affected and affected were stunting (2.9%, 5.7%), wasting (0.5%, 0.8%) and underweight (1.4%, 3.2%) respectively. The final logistics model after adjusting the confounders gives smaller odds in both earthquakes severely affected and affected area, significance the earthquake has protective effect on stunting, wasting and underweight of children living on that region. Conclusion: From our study earthquake does not has negative impact on undernutrition status for long time on children living in earthquake hit area. Further researches focusing on earthquake hit area will be required to generate more evidences on this aspect.