PANAJI: The number of children in Goa in the age group of 6-59 months suffering from anaemia has increased by more than 10 per cent since 2005.
The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) report 2015-16 states that 48.3 per cent of children currently suffer due to iron deficiency compared to 38.2 per cent during 2005-06.
According to the NFHS 2015-16, while the number of females who are anaemic in the age group of 15-49 years has reduced to 31.3 per cent from 38 per cent in 2005-06, the number of such males in the same age group has increased to 11 per cent from 10.4 per cent in 2005-06.
Anaemia is a condition which develops when blood lacks enough healthy red blood cells or haemoglobin. Health experts say that anaemia begins in childhood, worsens during adolescence in girls and gets aggravated during pregnancy. The common factors attributed to the cause of anaemia include poor iron stores at birth, low iron content of breast milk, low dietary iron intake through infancy and childhood and worm infestation.
With an objective to curb the cases of iron deficiency, the state government had launched weekly iron and folic acid supplementation programme (WIFS) in 2013, administering one tablet containing iron every Monday to government school students from Std VI to XII.
Chief Medical Officer of the health department Dr Vandana Dhume informed this daily that the government has decided to extend this programme to government-aided high schools and higher secondary schools from the academic year 2016-17. “Apart from the weekly iron tablets, we also administer de-worming tablets to these students twice every year, one each in the months of August and February”, she added.
With the slogan ‘Solid Bano India,’ the central government is trying to curb the impact of anaemia on children’s performance by covering all students in the schools and dropouts through the anganwadis. Under the national programme, an estimated 22,464 students are expected to be covered in Goa this year with around Rs 40 lakh assigned for the project by the health department.
The health department has appointed nodal teachers for every school, and sensitisation programmes for teachers and members of the parent-teachers associations are being organised.
World Health Organisation estimates that India has the highest prevalence of anaemia in all the groups – children, adolescent girls, pregnant women and adult men and women as compared to other developing countries.
The sample survey of NFHS 2015-16 for Goa was conducted from January 20, 2015, to April 6, 2015, by Goa Institute of Management (GIM).