Ikke nok med det: Forskere har fundet ud, at nyfødte ikke er i større risiko for at dø, hvis deres mødre er undervægtige – og det er de tit på et kontinent, så ofte præget af sult og fejlernæring.
LONDON, 10 August 2012 (IRIN): Making sure expectant mothers eat enough remains the main concern of health workers, especially in poorer rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, but this concentration has masked the fact that some pregnant women are dangerously overweight.
Swaziland, the fattest country in Africa, now has a maternal obesity (fedme) rate of 27 percent, and an additional 32 percent are overweight – levels comparable to those in Europe. In the UK, for instance, around half of pregnant women either overweight or obese.
National figures conceal great variation within countries, with the obesity rates estimated to be three times higher in urban areas than in rural ones. In many cities, this is a visible epidemic, and the causes are visible too.
Main streets in Nigeria’s cities are now lined with fast food outlets such as Mr Biggs and Chicken Republic. Nigeria’s national maternal obesity figures – 17 percent overweight and 6 percent obese – will conceal much higher rates among certain groups of women.
Being overweight is a known risk in pregnancy, and Jenny Cresswell, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has set out to track the consequences of these growing obesity rates on child survival.
Using the existing data in the demographic and health surveys compiled by ORC Macro on behalf of USAID (Amerikas Danida), Cresswell and her colleagues looked at figures from 27 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
They found that babies born to overweight and obese mothers were at significantly increased risk of neonatal death compared with those born to those to optimum-weight mothers.
Surprisingly, they found no increased risk of neonatal death (dødsfald hos nyfødte) for the babies of underweight mothers, even though that has been a traditional cause of concern.
Need for more data
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http://www.irinnews.org/Report/96075/HEALTH-Increasing-obesity-in-sub-Saharan-Africa-threatens-child-survival
