Four babies die of malnutrition in Bogor
By Joko Sarwono
BOGOR (JP): The crippling economic crisis that has hit the country for almost two years has begun killing the innocent infants of poor parents.
In the small village of Mulyaharja here, at least four babies aged between four months and three years reportedly died of marasmus between August and January, villagers and one of the few local medical staff told The Jakarta Post early this week.
Scores of other infants in the area are already hopelessly facing death, they added.
"Out of the remaining 75 under-two-year-old infants in this village, at least one-third already lack nutrition and are prone to undernourishment," Abdul Mughni, a young doctor at the village community health center, said.
The village infants' chronic undernourishment has occurred mainly due to the inability of poor parents to feed the babies adequately, particularly with milk, as prices of goods and services skyrocket here, the doctor and villagers said.
This unfavorable condition has even led to many women here being unable to regularly breastfeed their babies as they themselves are short of food.
Ibu Aroh, 40, for example, has given up handling her six-week- old baby boy, Hani, because her breasts no longer produce milk for the infant.
"At nights he has often cried while feeding as he found no more milk coming from my breasts," the woman said.
Usually, I had to stop feeding him for a while and continue a few minutes later although there'd be only a few drops of milk for my son. That's the only way I could feed my baby," Aroh, a wife of a local farm worker, said.
According to her, her husband Edi could only earn between Rp 5,000 and Rp 7,000 per day for the daily needs of the couple's 13 children who live in a small house in the Warung Limus area.
Such an income, equal to three liters of cheap rice, is a drop in the ocean during the current economic crisis.
"At the minimum, we need three and a half liters of rice every day to eat. But we can only afford to buy three liters of rice as the price is now between Rp 2,000 to Rp 2,500 per liter," she said.
"I, therefore, often have nothing to eat just to let my children survive. On a lucky day, I'd have a plate of plain rice," Aroh revealed.
The starving baby, which together with four other infants is now under Abdul's supervision , was just skin and bones.
Aroh said that Hani was 2.2 kilograms when he was born. Instead of putting on weight, Hani has already lost 100 grams.
According to Abdul, 60 percent of Mulyaharja's 10,000 population are living below the poverty line.
"Most of the people here do not care about their health. They go to the doctors only when they're seriously ill," the doctor, who has been in the village for the past year, said.
Abdul said he had done his best trying to solve the nightmare of the local village infants, such as by giving free medical service and looking for donations from certain parties to supply adequate nourishment to the babies.
The Japanese government, for example, had donated 88 cans of milk, RCTI television 1,668 cans of milk, and Pemuda Harapan non- governmental organization Rp 3 million to help the starving Mulyaharja infants.
"It proves that aid packages really help to improve the babies' health and weight," Abdul said.
"But I'm afraid that babies here will suffer marasmus again shortly after the aid finishes because the root of this problem is actually the declining ability of the local people to purchase basic commodities," the doctor said.