Malnutrition kills 5.6 million children each year: UNICEF

UNITED NATIONS: Malnutrition contributes to the deaths of some 5.6 million children every year, and the world has fallen far short in efforts to reduce hunger by half before 2015, the U.N. Children's Fund said.

The finding, announced in a UNICEF report card for children, was the latest evidence that the United Nations will not meet the Millennium Development Goals, a series of targets set out in 2000 to spur development and reduce poverty and hunger worldwide.

In its report, UNICEF said one of every four children under five, including 146 million kids in the developing world, is underweight.

"At our current pace, we will not meet the promise of the Millennium Development Goals," UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman said. The most troublesome area in the world is South Asia, where 46 percent of children are underweight. India, Bangladesh and Pakistan account for half of the world's underweight children even though they have only 30 percent of the world's population of children under five.

"Children in this region live in an almost constant state of emergency," Veneman said.

Veneman also said that poor nutrition, particularly the lack of iodine, is diminishing the brainpower of children worldwide, sometimes by several IQ points.

In many developing nations, mothers do not breast-feed their babies in the first six months of life, depriving them of crucial nutrients that stimulate their immune systems and protect them from respiratory infections, the report said.

New York, Wednesday, AP.