Today we were invited to bring our lunches to hear about the new strategy for addressing nutrition, which is a factor in 45% of deaths of children under 5 years old in the developing world. Luckily I had finished my lunch before I got too deep into conversation with Alexis, one of the Global Health Fellows here, who it turns out is a parasitologist by training and regaled me with gruesome tales of exotic human parasites...
I was particularly impressed by the way that multiple groups - research, agriculture, maternal and child health, development and advocacy - are working together across the foundation in an integrated way to address systemic issues around poor nutrition. Solutions range from better understanding what children in different countries eat, how nutritious the food is and even how it is absorbed, to developing affordable crops with higher nutrition value, to empowering women to have more control over how they grow or buy food to feed their children. The intent is to halve the number of children dying through poor nutrition in 15 years' time.
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