Southern African Development Community (SADC)’s 16-member countries were already facing serious food and nutrition insecurity even before Covid-19 pandemic hit a last nail in the coffin.
This is a conclusion contained in the SADC Regional Vulnerability Assessment & Analysis (RVAA) Synthesis Report 2020. The report indicates that in 2019, an estimated 41.2 million people within the region were food insecure, which is one of the highest in decades.
In addition, in 2020 the number of people who were hungry reached 44.8 million.
“The region also faces the triple burden of malnutrition. Children under age 5 are fed predominantly poor diets: 9 Member States report stunting rates above 30 percent, while 4 Member States report obesity rates of above 10 percent,” reads the report.
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The coronavirus pandemic may have caused the most widespread disruption of routine childhood vaccinations in recent history
By Jacqueline Howard, CNN
The coronavirus pandemic may have caused the “most widespread” disruption of routine childhood vaccinations in recent history, a new modeling study suggests.
At least 17 million children worldwide missed routine vaccinations because of the pandemic, according to the study’s estimates, published Wednesday in the journal The Lancet.
Unvaccinated or under-vaccinated children are vulnerable to outbreaks of disease, and public health officials around the world are worried.
“Routine immunization services faced stark challenges in 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic causing the most widespread and largest global disruption in recent history,” wrote the researchers, from the University of Washington in Seattle, the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Pan American He