the face of poverty

the face of poverty, originally uploaded by mattcotham.

I've been working on the malnutrition ward for the past several months,

and have treated scores of children who look like this because they

don't get enough protein in their diet to make the necessary parts of

their blood. I find that figuring out exactly what caused their

malnutrition can sometimes be a tricky thing, since often it's

complicated by occult tuberculosis or HIV. TB was on the way to being

eradicated in the world even 20 years ago, until HIV came along and the

numbers for TB exploded. Now we see a fair amount of TB in people who

aren't even HIV positive because of the resurgence in the HIV population.

This child looked like a normal kid after about 2 weeks on our

high-energy protein diet, which the nurses make on the malnutrition ward

from peanuts and soy beans and sugar. I wish I'd take an after picture

to show you as well....