Nit-Picking

It's Steve again. We learned that parents in Sagitun, a nearby village, were alarmed about head lice among the school children. It was my privilege to work with the response by teachers, parents, and Ministry of Health. My work partner from HECOPAB (Health Education and Community Participation Bureau) and I got a ride to the village with a public health inspector who was collecting water samples in the region. We were packing three cases of shampoo bottles laced with 1% permethrin as well as a ten-minute slide show on lice infestation.

I gave the presentation starting with Infant I (kindergarten) class. It was more pictures than science, and I walked through the rows of desks showing the laptop picture to each student as I spoke. The teacher (who is an angel) repeated the message with each slide, and then she lined them up and led them to the playground for the “activity part”.

The treatment plan was a shampoo, then a ten-minute wait with lather in the scalp, followed by clean-water rinse and fine-tooth combing to remove more eggs attached to the hair. Repeat treatment after 3 days is recommended.

At first, the three of us worked on each child. Several mothers were recruited by texting, and they brought towels, buckets, and more fine-tooth combs. While I moved on to address Infant 2 class, the assembly line kicked into high gear, and in less than four hours, we had taught and shampooed over 100 students.

We left two cases of shampoo for a follow-up treatments.

My Observations on Child Nutrition in Belize

Hi, Steve here. One of my primary work partners is a young man who is a social worker by training. He is in charge of the district’s child nutrition project. It is a national project to identify undernourished children up to two years of age and provide food supplement to bring them back up on the growth chart.

The network includes satellite clinics, rural health posts, and community health workers who function much like nurse practitioners. Babies have their weight and length measured when they come in for check-ups and immunizations. If their growth is not progressing or if they fall below the second standard deviation for age, they are  are given supplements. If they are at minus three standard deviations, they are referred to the regional doctors, since they may also have parasites or other illness in addition to not eating enough calories.

Children are supplemented up to the age of two since that is the critical time of development that cannot be corrected by feeding later in life. The cut-off at age two is not a hard end point, and there is some flexibility.

The supplement used is Incaparina and comes dry and packaged in plastic. It looks like corn meal but is mostly soy protein and has vitamin supplements. Each serving (corn and soy flours) of Incaparina contains 379 calories and has 21.75 grams of protein, no sugar, 5.58 grams of fat, 9.9 grams of fiber and zero cholesterol. The brochures describe many ways to prepare it. It keeps for up to four days with refrigeration once it is prepared.

I think the program is a wonderful one and is pretty successful. The weak point may be the number of community health workers who are on the front lines of the campaign. They work extremely hard and are underpaid. I think they need more help. The payoff will be the next generation of youth who will start life without the deficit of malnutrition.  

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Fu We Dog's first bath