Abstract

PIP: Anthropomorphic measurements have been found to be most useful in the assessment of nutritional and health status. Scattered cross-sectional community anthropomorphic measurements of rural preschool children from 8 regions of Tanzania were carried out in 1976 and 1977. This report involves 4766 preschool children and 341 school children who had their anthropomorphic measurements analyzed. The results showed that 2.4% of the preschool children had severe Protein Energy Malnutrition (PEM), whereas 42.6% suffered from mild to severe PEM. There were more underweight children among preschool girls than among the boys in all age groups, except in those aged 0-6 months. School girls, however, had fewer underweight children among them than school boys. This is a finding not reported in 4 other studies in Tanzania involving some 2000 preschool children, in the past. There is a cumulative stunting becoming maximum at the 18-30 month age group. The mean average "stunting" prevalence was 46.5% while the mean average "wasting" prevalence was 8.3%. There is a need to find out the reason why PEM prevalence among preschool children has not changed since about 15 years ago, while it is common knowledge that primary health care facilities have doubled or even quadrupled in quantity during the same period. It is rather expedient to find out if there is preferential treatment of preschool boys by parents.