Achieving the Millennium Development Goals through mainstreaming nutrition: speaking with one voice.

At the most recent meeting of the Standing Committee on Nutrition of the UN system in Geneva in March of this year (2006) there was a dramatic shift in the tenor of the opening plenary session. Three very high-ranking officials of three of the largest implementing UN agencies (WHO UNICEF World Bank) along with WFP and FAO produced -- independently of one another -- a clear consistent message focusing on the importance of nutrition for development. In each case this was couched within the comparative advantage of each agency. It was also striking that none of the speakers came from a background of nutrition training -- one economist one public health physician one health economist and one development expert. All had been converted by enthusiastic nutrition colleagues within their particular agency and by long experience in many countries and an expanding evidence base. All referred to the same evidence base -- the Bellagio Child Survival Study Group and subsequent papers published not in nutrition or even public health journals but in medical journals (the Lancet and the British Medical Journal in particular) although the significance of this will not be discussed here. But all were somewhat perplexed as to why nutrition issues were not an automatic component of all national health and development programmes including within each agency. They had clearly used their considerable experience in the public sector to think this through especially the importance of having a common and consistent message. (excerpt

Impact of a Social Marketing Campaign Promoting Dark-green Leafy Vegetables and Eggs in Central Java,Indonesia

In order to work towards further reduction of vitamin A deficiency in central Java, Indonesia, a social marketing campaign promoting eggs and dark-green leafy vegetables was initiated in March 1996. The nutritional surveillance system (December 1995- December 1996) found the following. The campaign's messages were well noticed. Consumption of at least one egg in the past week increased from 80% to 92% in mothers and from 78% to 92% in children 1236 months old. It increased in all socio-economic groups and was independent of ownership of chickens. Most eggs had been purchased. The quantity of vegetables prepared increased from 93 to 111 g/person daily and most was purchased. Vitamin A intake increased from 335 to 371 RE/d for mothers and from 130 to 160 RE/d for children. Serum retinol levels increased after the start of the campaign, and were related to egg consumption and vitamin A intake. Because 1. data were collected in such a way that respondents were not aware of the link between data collected and the campaign, and 2. vitamin A status increased and was related to increased consumption of eggs and vitamin A intake, we conclude that the social marketing campaign was successful

Multiplayer Cost Games with Simple Nash Equilibria

Multiplayer games with selfish agents naturally occur in the design of distributed and embedded systems. As the goals of selfish agents are usually neither equivalent nor antagonistic to each other, such games are non zero-sum games. We study such games and show that a large class of these games, including games where the individual objectives are mean- or discounted-payoff, or quantitative reachability, and show that they do not only have a solution, but a simple solution. We establish the existence of Nash equilibria that are composed of k memoryless strategies for each agent in a setting with k agents, one main and k-1 minor strategies. The main strategy describes what happens when all agents comply, whereas the minor strategies ensure that all other agents immediately start to co-operate against the agent who first deviates from the plan. This simplicity is important, as rational agents are an idealisation. Realistically, agents have to decide on their moves with very limited resources, and complicated strategies that require exponential--or even non-elementary--implementations cannot realistically be implemented. The existence of simple strategies that we prove in this paper therefore holds a promise of implementability.Comment: 23 page

Sharing Independence & Relabeling: Efficient Formal Verification of Higher-Order Masking

The efficient verification of the security of masked hardware implementations is an important issue that hinders the development and deployment of randomness-efficient masking techniques. At EUROCRYPT 2018, Bloem et al. [6] introduced the first practical formal tool to prove the side-channel resilience of masked circuits in the probing model with glitches. Most recently Barthe et al.[2] introduced a more efficient formal tool that builds upon the findings of Bloem et al. for modeling the effects of glitches. While Barthe et al.\u27s approach greatly improves the first-order verification performance, it shows that higher-order verification in the probing model with glitches is still enormously time-consuming for larger circuits like a second-order AES S-box, for instance. Furthermore, the results of Barthe et al. underline the discrepancy between state-of-the-art formal security notions that allow for faster verification of circuits. Namely the strong non-interference (SNI) notion, and existing masked hardware implementations that are secure in the probing model with glitches. In this work, we extend and improve the formal approaches of Bloem et al. and Barthe et al. on manifold levels. We first introduce a so-called sharing independence notion which helps to reason about the independence of shared variables. We then show how to use this notion to test for the independence of input and output sharings of a module which allows speeding up the formal verification of circuits that do not fulfill the SNI notion. With this extension, we are for the time able to verify the security of a second-order masked DOM AES S-box which takes about 3 seconds, and up to a fifth-order AES S-box which requires about 47 days for verification. Furthermore, we discuss in which case the independence of input and output sharings lead to composability

Are low tolerable upper intake levels for vitamin a undermining effective food fortification efforts?

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is a major health problem, particularly in low-resource countries, putting an estimated 125-130 million preschool-aged children at increased risk of morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases. Vitamin A supplementation reduces VAD and increases child survival; it is complemented by fortifying foods with vitamin A. Concern over increased risk of bone fracture associated with vitamin A intakes below the tolerable upper intake level (UL) among populations in affluent countries conflicts with the need to increase intakes in less developed countries, where populations are at greater risk of VAD and intakes are unlikely to reach the UL as diets include fewer foods containing retinol while vitamin A from carotenoids poses no risk of overdose. With the implementation of recently developed risk management tools, vitamin A can be used safely in food fortification, including point-of-use fortification in the context of supplementation among specific target groups in low-resource countrie

Relationship of homestead food production with night blindness among children below 5 years of age in Bangladesh

Abstract Objective To examine the relationship between homestead food production and night blindness among pre-school children in rural Bangladesh in the presence of a national vitamin A supplementation programme. Design A cross-sectional study. Setting A population-based sample of six rural divisions of Bangladesh assessed in the Bangladesh Nutrition Surveillance Project 2001-2005. Subjects A total of 158 898 children aged 12-59 months. Results The prevalence rates of night blindness in children among those who did and did not receive vitamin A capsules in the last 6 months were 0·07 % and 0·13 %, respectively. Given the known effect of vitamin A supplementation on night blindness, the analysis was stratified by children's receipt of vitamin A capsules in the last 6 months. Among children who did not receive vitamin A capsules in the last 6 months, the lack of a home garden was associated with increased odds of night blindness (OR = 3·16, 95 % CI 1·76, 5·68; P = 0·0001). Among children who received vitamin A capsules in the last 6 months, the lack of a home garden was not associated with night blindness (OR = 1·28, 95 % CI 0·71, 2·31; P = 0·4). Conclusions Homestead food production confers a protective effect against night blindness among pre-school children who missed vitamin A supplementation in rural Banglades