KABUL: UNICEF (United Nation Children’s Fund) has warned the whole of Afghanistan that there is a chance that 1 million children may die because of the lack of malnutrition. The government urgently needs to take action.

Taking to Twitter on Wednesday, the United Nation’s agency referred to the case of a two year old child case and said: “She recently recovered from acute watery diarrhea, two years old Soria is back in the hospital, this time suffering from edema and wasting. Her mother has been by her bedside for the past fifteen days anxiously waiting for Soria to recover.”

After that tweet, UNICEF added that “1 million children could die from severe acute malnutrition.” 

As per the estimates of UNICEF, 24.4 million Afghans, of which 13.1 million were children, will urgently need humanitarian help in this year, 2022. 

1.1 million of the total number given by UNICEF are acutely malnourished children under the age of five. This happened because of the food crisis and poor access to water, sanitation, and hygiene services. 

Outbreaks of life-threatening diseases continue, with over 60,000 cases of measles reported last year in 2021.

As per the Taliban’s Ministry of Public Health reports, which claimed that nearly 4.4 million children are suffering from malnutrition in the country. 

According to the health sector spokesperson “Javid Hajir”, “To overcome malnutrition in Afghanistan, there have been some measures implemented to improve the health sector and also to compel the international help to support the Afghan health sector.”

Research released by The Lancet medical journal states that malnutrition contributes to 3.1 million under-five child deaths annually, or 45 percent of all deaths for that age group, underscores the urgent need to accelerate the fight against the condition.

Every hour of every day, 300 children die because of malnutrition. It’s an underlying cause of more than one-third of children’s deaths – 2.6 million every year.