Families with malnourished children have been advised to increase care for them as they need a balanced diet and special protection from infections and communicable diseases.
“In this era of COVID-19 when everyone needs strong immunity, you have to ignore entrenched cultural practices that compromise on proper feeding of your children, especially those that are malnourished”.
Ms Gloria Kobati, the Upper East Regional Nutrition Officer, said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Bolgatanga, on alternative measures being taken to protect children, especially malnourished ones in rural communities during the COVID-19 period.
She said entrenched cultural practices such as preventing children from eating eggs among other healthy foods and hiding malnourished children at home had to be stopped.
Ms Kobati, said there were no therapeutic foods for malnourished children and added that her outfit continued to provide more of community counseling and child healthcare services for the mothers to ensure they fed the children adequately since interventions that supplied supplementary foods had stopped.
The Nutrition Officer said there had not been any increase in the numbers of children with acute malnutrition in the region and urged mothers to exclusively breastfeed their babies, whether they had contracted the disease or not.
Ms Kobati was, however, worried about some cultural practices that prevented some communities from presenting their malnourished children for child care services and added that identification of cases in the communities was difficult unless such children were brought to the health centre.
The beginning of the case identification starts at the hospital, she said and urged communities to help by allowing mothers to attend childcare services and also help identify such children.
She also advised families to feed their children well and avoid such entrenched practices that affect the growth of the children.
She said the colostrum, which is the fluid produced from the breast after delivery was vital food for the baby and should not be expressed and thrown away.
