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When it comes to malnutrition, it's photographs of emaciated children and words like famine, crisis or emergency that make headlines round the world.

But is that the real story? 

As hunger once again stalks West Africa's Sahel region, journalists attending two Thomson Reuters Foundation workshops in Senegal in March heard that a key part of the story may be your mother's weight at birth.

« This is really just the tip of the iceberg, » Roland Kupka, a UNICEF nutrition specialist in the region, said of the emerging lean-season crisis that could see more than a million children under five needing emergency food aid.

« We have to save these children from dying, and the next step is to make sure that children do not reach this critical stage, » Kupka, who works on child survival and development, added. 

Dealing with that, as the journalists from across West Africa heard, is all about understanding what the specialists call « chronic » malnutrition, a silent scourge that affects an estimated 170 million children around the world each year. 

LOADED WORD

The workshops brought together French-speaking and English-speaking journalists from 15 countries and nutritionists from the multi-agency REACH (Renewed Effort Against Child Hunger) initiative in the region.   

«Famine » has become a loaded word, one politicians hate to use if it reflects on their management of affairs in the run-up to a crisis. 

But whether you use « famine » or humanitarian crisis, it's often the end of a story of repeated nutritional deficiencies and resulting illnesses that goes back to childhood and beyond.

Presidents and prime ministers are often judged on their first 100 days. Nutritionists now talk about the first 1000 days of a girl's life. 

« This is the period when we can begin to reverse the malnutrition that has been in the family for generations, » Anna Horner, regional nutrition advisor with the U.N. World Food Programme, told the English-speaking group.

THE CIRCLE OF LIFE

« The mother's weight when she was born can have an impact right through the generational cycle, » she said. «  It continues along the generations unless we work really hard to break that cycle. »   

 

Chronic malnutrition stops children developing normally, resulting in physical and mental problems or learning difficulties. 

Nutritionists say that you can have children who are too short for their age (« stunted » is the technical term) or underweight in areas with bumper harvests, and even in comparatively wealthy areas where malnutrition increasingly takes the form of obesity.

Eating just one type of food, whether for cultural or other reasons, can leave children starved of the range of nutrients, vitamins and minerals they need to develop normally.

The three-day workshops in Senegal's capital Dakar offered the participants, who work for radio, television and text media, an opportunity to acquire the knowledge they need to report on malnutrition.

Presentations by nutritionists and a reporting trip offered them the opportunity to use their skills to gather quotes, facts, figures and personal observations for use in publishable stories.

A SILENT EMERGENCY

The reporting trip took them to centres for local mothers with young or malnourished children. In one, the mothers learn how to use a nutritious local plant called morenga and grow their own vegetables at home. 

« There are forms of malnutrition that can be somewhat invisible, » Anna Horner said. « We sometimes call it the silent emergency, particularly in West Africa. »

Future mothers start building up stocks of the nutrients they will need during pregnancy when they are in the womb, during infancy, childhood and adolescence.

Apart from the first 1000 days and programmes to promote exclusive breastfeeding during the first six months of a baby's life, efforts to break the cycle of malnutrition now focus on ensuring women in areas of risk of child-bearing age get the nutrients they need before, during and after pregnancy.

This covers girls from 15, which is new, to women of 49.

« The birth weight of the mother will really have a strong nutritional impact on the birth weight of the child, » Anna Horner said. « If we can break this cycle we will really have an impact, »