Hunger becomes more lethal in Malawi

MBADZO, Malawi -- One by one, the women of this hungry village untied their babies from their backs and hung them on a scale dangling from the limb of a mango tree. As a volunteer called out the weights, Anna Bande, a nurse, grimly plotted the toll of southern Africa's latest drought on Malawi's young.

''It is affecting every child," Bande, 53, said wearily as she drew lines on grubby paper growth charts recently. Instead of the smooth upward arc of healthy, growing children, the babies of Mbadzo had lines that zigzagged slowly higher before spiking down in the past month, as the last of the food from a disastrous harvest disappeared.

A drought across six southern African countries has left 12 million people hungry this year, according to the United Nations. None has reached the acute hunger crisis faced by Niger, in West Africa, during the summer. But Malawi has long been ravaged by malnutrition, AIDS, and desperate poverty, and many children are now suffering from all three.

Bande said she had raised 18 children -- nine of her own and nine orphans. As the head of child and maternal health at Trinity Hospital, she has known thousands of others. Yet rarely, she said, has she seen so many hungry children. With five months until the harvest, admission for severe malnutrition already is running one-third higher than a year ago. A child is dying nearly every week.

''This year, each and every house, there's no food," said Bande, who wore a plain blue uniform and an orange head scarf.

About 12 million people live in this landlocked sliver of a country wedged between Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique in southeastern Africa. There is little economic activity, especially here in the sun-baked Shire Valley, other than dirt farming on tiny plots to raise corn, or working on a neighbor's farm for about 40 cents a day.

When the rain comes, there is enough food, but only barely. Nearly half of all children suffer from stunted growth.

When the rain doesn't come, the bottom drops from beneath this fragile society. Meager food stocks disappear. Casual farm jobs vanish, making it harder to buy food as prices soar because of scarcity. The most desperate residents start scavenging for wild roots or leaves.

The most recent harvest, in April and May, produced one-third or less of the corn grown in a good year, farmers here say. Many fields yielded nothing at all.

Among the hungry, diseases such as malaria and AIDS race ahead with scant resistance from weakened immune systems. Malnourished children get sick, and some die.

The UN World Food Program is already feeding 1.3 million Malawians and has plans to reach 2.9 million in a few months, though donations are running far short of the projected need as food shortages deepen.

In Mbadzo, a village in south-central Malawi where modest homes built of handmade bricks dot terraced, brown hillsides, the supply of food from any source has slowed to a trickle.

Under the mango tree, Tisunganane Matumbo, 3, dangled from the scale with a look of terror in his eyes. As he hung there in a loose-fitting baby-blue outfit, the volunteer read out his weight.

The news was not good: Tisunganane had lost 2 of his 30 pounds in the past month. He also had been getting fevers, reported his mother, Patricia Matumbo, 30, who has four other children.

''There's no food at home," she explained. ''Last year everything was dried out. Nobody harvested anything."

A few minutes later, in another line beside another mango tree, Bande began examining scores of children. She pulled down their eyelids to look for the yellowish tint of jaundice, felt skin for fever, and probed stomachs for signs of severe malnutrition or other ailments.

After Bande had seen about 50 children, she was handed a plump 1-year-old girl. She declared with a bright smile, and a hint of surprise, ''A healthy baby."

It was, she said, only the second she had seen all day.

The news was not as good for a 4-year-old girl with skin rashes, mouth sores, and a growth chart showing that she had spent her brief lifetime falling short of weight targets. Bande urged the mother to bring her daughter to the hospital immediately.

But she also suspected the child had advanced AIDS, which meant there were limits to what could be done.

Malawi has an estimated 65,000 children under the age of 5 with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

While nations such as South Africa have sharply cut transmission of the virus from mothers to children through one-time doses of nevirapine, the antiretroviral drug is only just beginning to be deployed widely in Malawi's rural areas.

The country's per-capita income of $170 a year is one of the lowest in the world, and abject poverty makes breast-feeding, which can also pass the virus to infants, necessary for many.