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Health: The challenge of improving nutrition

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Scientists have irrefutable evidence that malnutrition, which affects one in three people, increases the risk of disease and death and reduces productivity and socioeconomic development. Can they also point to proven interventions to help?

Displaying 1-16 of 16 links

African Journal of Food Agriculture, Nutrition and Development

AJFAND is an academic journal — published quarterly — by the Rural Outreach Programme, a non-profit company based in Kenya. The journal's free-access website features peer-reviewed articles about poverty, food security, disease and agriculture in Africa. It also provides commentaries, short communications, book reviews, and relevant news and events. Students can submit work to the student section.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Nutrition

The Gates Foundation's nutrition programme aims to include essential vitamins and minerals in the diets of people in the developing world, and to guarantee proper nutrition under the age of two, including in the womb.

Progress sheets and a strategy overview on the organisation's nutrition program are available to download as well as press releases and information on grants given. The website also includes job listings, downloadable fact sheets, financial statements and annual reviews.

The foundation funds population-wide food fortification programmes and invests in research and development of diagnostic tools and biomarkers for identifying and measuring micronutrient deficiencies. It also funds research to examine how different nutritional interventions affect infection.

Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)

CIDA is an agency of the Canadian government that supports sustainable development activities in developing countries through work with private and public companies and international organisations. The agency focuses on six priorities: basic human needs (such as nutrition, sanitation and water); gender equality;  infrastructure services; human rights, democracy and good governance; private sector development; and environment.

Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research is an association of public and private members supporting a system of 16 Future Harvest centres that work in more than 100 countries to mobilise cutting-edge science to reduce hunger and poverty, improve human nutrition and health, and protect the environment. As well as taking a keen interest in agricultural biotechnology, much of CGIAR's research has direct relevance to biodiversity. CGIAR also coordinates a global network of genebanks that aims to keep the bulk of the world's plant genetic resources in the public domain.

Food and Agriculture Organisation

The Food and Agriculture Organisation is a United Nations body with a mandate to raise levels of nutrition and standards of living, to improve agricultural productivity, and to better the condition of rural populations.

FoodFirst: The Institute for Food and Development Policy

FoodFirst opposes the use of genetic engineering in agriculture and food. It publishes briefings, position papers and opinion articles on genetically modified crop technology in relation to sustainable agriculture, hunger and poverty. Its website includes audio and video interviews with FoodFirst staff as well as photo galleries illustrating, among other topics, agriculture in developing countries.

Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)

This foundation's mission is to reduce malnutrition through food fortification. It focuses on providing supplements — such as iodised salt — and healthy food to malnourished populations. The website includes downloadable fact sheets of GAIN's programmes around the world and overviews of vitamins and nutrient deficiencies.

The organisation targets vulnerable groups such as young children, pregnant women, people with infectious diseases, remote rural populations, or refugees. GAIN takes a business-minded approach to funding better nutrition, pooling its money with financial institutions, not-for-profit global venture funds and venture capitalists to encourage local businesses to develop new products, distribution channels and marketing approaches.

Grain: Food crisis

GRAIN is a nongovernmental organisation that promotes sustainable management of agricultural biodiversity. The food crisis section of this website links to publications and websites about the global food crisis and its impact on small-scale farmers in the developing world. It publishes articles, films and audio files including several articles on the rise in 'land-grabbing', in which, to ensure their own food security, rich countries buy up large tracts of land in poor ones.

International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics

This non-profit organisation aims to develop sustainable ecological farming in Africa and India. ICRISAT's mission is "to help empower 600 million poor people to overcome hunger, poverty and a degraded environment in the dry tropics through better agriculture".

ICRISAT's BioPower initiative aims to ensure that bioenergy research benefits the poor. Its activities include analysing bioenergy trends and understanding their repercussions for the poor, and enabling governments to formulate pro-bioenergy policies that benefit poor people.

South African Health Information Network

SA HealthInfo provides information about health and health research issues in Southern Africa, with topics ranging from HIV and malaria, to traditional medicines and nutrition. This part of the site provides information about ethics in research, including the South African MRC's latest guidance.

SUSTAIN

SUSTAIN is a nonprofit organisation that aims to improve nutrition in developing countries through innovative applications of food science and technology. It publishes articles on topics such as tortilla fortification, iron bioavailability screening tool and enhancing iron absorption and links to external resources.

Food safety is an important issue in nutrition and SUSTAIN also runs workshops on good manufacturing practices and the best packaging methods to prevent food from spoiling.

The National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD) Center of Excellence for Nutritional Genomics

The NCMHD Center of Excellence for Nutritional Genomics — a collaboration between five university departments, research institutes and hospitals — publishes news, information and commentary on research that cuts across nutrition, genomics, and health. It also provides a list of definitions, image library and links to relevant sites and users can sign-up to receive email alerts of the latest news in nutrigenomics.

The centre's research focuses on genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics to identify genes that might affect health risks from a poor diet. Its goal is to devise genome-based nutritional interventions to prevent or treat diseases such as asthma, obesity, and diabetes.

The World of Food Science

This online quarterly journal, published jointly by the US-based Institute of Food Technologists and the International Union of Food Science and Technology, publishes reports on food science and technology from around the globe. It also publishes policy papers, regional reports, updates on international regulations and feature articles on subjects such as food science and technology in West Africa and China.

Food security features often in the journal, and there is a special section in each issue dedicated to it.

UN Children's Fund (UNICEF): Nutrition

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) focuses on nutrition in early childhood and in pregnant and lactating women but it also tackles nutrition in emergency situations and in HIV-infected people. Its website provides an overview of its activities including providing nutrition security in emergencies, monitoring infant growth rates, distributing micronutrients and child feeding and care.

News updates from UNICEF as well as tables of statistics relating to children and nutrition are freely available as well as links to UNICEF publications and external links.

WHO: Food safety

This website aggregates WHO publications on food safety and highlights relevant meetings and conferences. It includes links to the WHO initiative to estimate the global burden of foodborne diseases and links to the WHO's five keys to safer food that provides information and training material to improve food safety. Food safety, alongside nutrition and food security, is one of the WHO's strategic objectives for 2008–2013.

WHO: Nutrition

This website gathers together the WHO's reports and other documents on malnutrition and health, and highlights relevant meetings and conferences. It hosts the WHO Nutrition Landscape Information System that provides downloadable data on nutrition and nutrition-related health and development data in the form of country profiles. The profiles focus on nutrition-related indicators such as vitamin and mineral deficiencies and food security.