Health crisis: Experts urge need to decrease iodine deficiency in country

Say at a seminar that lack of iodised salt causing intellectual disabilities in children

ISLAMABAD:

It is estimated that 57 per cent of children under the age of five are iodine deficient and prone to have a low IQ which could lead to intellectual disability.

“In Pakistan, goiter — a painful enlargement of the thyroid gland due to severe iodine deficiency — is not as major a concern as the children who are being born with low IQ,” said a representative of the United Nations Children’s Fund-UNICEF who wished not to be named as he was not authorized to talk to media directly.



He was talking exclusively to The Express Tribune after the concluding ceremony of a one-day workshop on Iodine Deficiency Disorder (IDD) organised by The Network for Consumer Protection in collaboration with Unicef at a local hotel on Thursday.

The representative said children with IDD could lead to an increase in school dropout rates, and being dependant on their parents or other family members, would not be able to take part in productive work.

“Currently, Pakistan lacks data on mothers who are iodine deficient and giving birth to such children. It is estimated however that their (mothers’) number is much higher than the number of children who are iodine deficient,” he said.

When asked about the government’s role in addressing IDD, the official expressed satisfaction.

He said the Sindh Assembly had passed Universal Salt Iodisation Bill few years back and now all eyes are on the passage of the national law which is currently with the Cabinet Division for the last four years.

Talking about the challenges, he said there is a need to make potassium iodate available in the local markets. The substance turns common edible salt into iodised salt by a simple spraying action. Besides there is a need to increase the amount of fine or a punishment for a person who is selling uniodised salt, under the pure food rules law.

Dismal figures 

Participants at the workshop were informed that IDD occurs when people do not receive iodine in their diets on a regular basis — and it can be easily corrected by adding iodine to salt.

Iodine deficiency is a major public health issue in the country, where 50 per cent of the population is at risk and 72 per cent of children are iodine deficient, which leads to two million children being born with mental impairment.

During pregnancy, even milder deficiencies can retard fetal development and result in physical and mental retardation, informed Dr Samina Naeem, assistant professor at the Health Services Academy, Islamabad.

She said other effects of IDD include goiter, abnormal physical development, reproductive loss, and severe mental and physical retardation — an irreversible condition known as cretinism.

These trainings and workshops are of particular importance in capacity-enhancing of the media for content generation on a particular health-related issue, said Nadeem Iqbal, executive coordinator of TheNetwork.

Just one teaspoon of iodine in a lifetime can provide a high degree of protection against a range of iodine-deficiency disorders, claimed Dr Syed Qadir, nutrition officer at Unicef.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2014.