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Essay / Malnutrition and Poverty in Bangladesh - 691
Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. It is one of the least developed countries, strangled by several health problems such as water contamination and HIV/AIDS, but the most prevalent health problem in Bangladesh is child malnutrition (Christian Nordqvist, 2010). Malnutrition is classified into two types, undernutrition and overnutrition. However, in Bangladesh, the main concern is undernutrition, the status in which individuals cannot use the food they eat or are malnourished when their diet does not provide them with enough calories and protein for their maintenance and their growth (Christian Nordqvist, 2010). Bangladesh ranks first in child malnutrition, with 41% of Bangladeshi children suffering from undernutrition (Guy Hubbard, 2013). The causes of such a high percentage of malnourished children in Bangladesh can be linked to three main causes: low literacy rate, geographical location of Bangladesh and food shortage in Bangladesh. A large uneducated population in Bangladesh makes malnutrition a more critical problem. problem in the field of health and nutrition due to lack of knowledge about birth contraceptives. Bangladesh has one of the lowest literacy rates in South Asia; In Bangladesh, education is financed with only 2.4% of its GDP (Tradingeconomics, 2009). Additionally, although education is subsidized by the Bangladesh government, the cost of higher education is much higher than the average household income in Bangladesh (Guy Hubbard, 2013). Low literacy rates lead to child undernutrition in two main ways: uneducated parents are unaware of sexual contraception and often have multiple children, resulting in family income being divided by a large number of members, leading to less food for each individual, the average In Bangladesh, the household size is 4.4 people per family (Nisha Kumar Kulkarni, 2011). But the most important thing is that uneducated parents have children with a very short birth interval. Children born to mothers with a short birth interval are more likely to suffer from malnutrition, the World Health Organization study shows. An equally important factor that makes malnutrition so prevalent in Bangladesh is the geographical location of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is mostly low-lying and flood-prone. Land located in high-risk areas is relatively much cheaper than land located at higher elevations. Thus, the poor who live in these at-risk areas are often devastated by floods, destroying their land, homes and crops...