By Sulaiman Stom Koroma
A two-day symposium on Mortality in Africa has concluded in Freetown with a call for emphasis on qualitative research in diagnosing malnutrition.
The symposium held at the Radisson Blu Mammy Yoko Hotel drew participants from across Africa and other parts of the world to discuss the rate of maternal mortality on the continent.
During his presentation on the topic: ‘Malnutrition in the causal chain of under-five child deaths: The role of clinical misdiagnoses – Bombali and Bo Districts in Sierra Leone’, the Deputy CHAMPS Team Lead, Dr. Erick Kaluma, started by defining malnutrition as deficiencies or excesses in nutrient intake, imbalance of essential nutrients, or impaired nutrient utilization. He added that the UN SDG target 2.2 states that 50% of under-five deaths have malnutrition in the causal chain.
Dr. Kaluma continued that the effect of malnutrition weakens immunity, leaving the patient susceptible to long-term developmental delays and severe irreversible physical and cognitive damage. This, he went on, is why CHAMPS (Child Health And Mortality, Prevention Surveillance), a Global surveillance network that generates and shares accurate causes of death data on child mortality, did a study between 2019 and 2022 to compare the accuracy of diagnosis of malnutrition between clinicians and the CHAMPS DeCoDe panel focusing on Children 6 months to 5 years, Malnutrition in the causal chain of death Exclusion, Cases without clinical abstraction, among others.
Dr Kaluma ended by saying that clinicians are missing a diagnosis of malnutrition in up to 76% of children under 5, for which he recommended improving the capacity for the clinical diagnosis of malnutrition, noting that additional qualitative research is needed in this regard.
Apart from the presentation, there were eight additional posters prepared by local CHAMPS staff in Makeni and Bo. The write-ups will be considered for publication, according to officials.
The panel which featured CHAMPS comprised Dr. Portia C Mutevedzi, who spoke on how CHAMPS is reducing child mortality through post-mortem testing in resource-limited settings with high mortality; Mr. Sorie I.B Kamara, who spoke on the foundation for High-resolution Mortality Surveillance, the Experience of CHAMPS in Sierra Leone; and Mr. Tesfamichael A. Sisay, who looked at the Minimally Invasive Tissue Sampling (MITS) in home settings: a descriptive study in Butajira Health and Demographic Surveillance system (HDSS).
The roundtable discussion was chaired by Dr. Ikechukwu Ogbuanu, the County Site Director of CHAMPS.
