Nutritional Immune Deficiency Syndrome

By Prof Dr BM Hegde*


"The irony of it all is that the whole world knows and worries about AIDS whose total universal load is only about 30 to 33 million in all in contrast to the Indian load alone of NIDS of 67 million—it is on the rise!


'Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter'— Martin Luther King, Jr


Immune system is the one that keeps us alive in this complicated world, dominated by human greed as the driving force. That is our inbuilt doctor that could correct any deviation from the normal if we look after the immune system well. Good nutrition is an essential part of immune system health. Poverty, with the associated hypoproteinaemia, is at the root of all immune deficiency. India, unfortunately, has the highest load of childhood immune deficiency resulting in all kinds of illnesses in our children sending them to meet their maker in heaven prematurely in thousands almost daily. I had labelled this as Nutritional Immune Deficiency Syndrome (NIDS) ten years ago in a paper in a leading journal to attract the attention of the powers that be and the well-meaning general public. Since then I have been talking and writing about it on innumerable occasions. Except for two thinking chief ministers of Indian states, no one could care less. Those two states, which took my advice seriously, are on the way to improving their children’s immune status whose efforts, unfortunately, begin almost from the time the child is made in the mother’s womb!


The irony of it all is that the whole world knows and worries about AIDS whose total universal load is only about 30 to 33 million in all in contrast to the Indian load alone of NIDS of 67 million—it is on the rise! The whole of sub-Saharan Africa has a load of 42 million. There is a reason for this anomaly. While drug companies are pushing their costly drugs to treat the evanescent AIDS costing millions of dollars and billions of dollars are available for people who claim to be AIDS researchers, the poor NIDS has no sponsor at all. The man who reported the first case of AIDS in 1981 got the Nobel Prize recently for just an ordinary case report where his group showed a virus in the bone marrow of that young man who died due to the disease in Paris. There is no proof that the said virus is the cause of that syndrome as immune deficient patients could harbour all kinds of germs in their body. One would now realise as to how disease mongering goes on in this era of prospering sickness industry. 


Poverty, with its consequent nutritional deficiency, does not seem to be easing in the near future, either. Economist Utsa Patnaik in her lecture recently in Chennai testified that between 1991 and 2001, the first post-liberalisation decade, the per capita consumption of foodgrain had gone down by at least 25 to 30 kgs. 75% of protein and calorie energy come from foodgrain for the rural poor; the fall in consumption will have serious impact on their nutritional status. This, as explained later, will impact the childhood malnutrition load seriously. The liberalization policy has reversed the trend of improvement of per capita consumption achieved in the first 40 years post-independence. The National Sample Survey showed that while official records were used for the published nutrition norms of 2004-2005, the actual poverty lines were almost double the official ones. The situation for the rural poor is very bleak indeed what with official inflation rates in double digits! The poor, even today, pay for their poverty with their own lives!  ------------------- "


*(Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes, chairman of the State Health Society's Expert Committee, Govt of Bihar, Patna. He is former vice-chancellor of Manipal University at Mangalore and former professor for cardiology of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, University of London. Prof Dr Hegde can be contacted at hegdebm@gmail.com)


(My note:  There is a lot more to this article.  Here is a link.)


http://www.moneylife.in/article/nutritional-immune-deficiency-syndrome/22997.html


tags:
nutrigenomics human nutrition food safety food wars hunger malnutrition poverty genetics nanotechnology robotics kurzweil monsanto dupont pioneer corn genetically modified usda fda eggs beef poultry pork turkey fish shellfish fruits vegetables food borne illness wheat rice oats barley sorghum soybeans alfalfa protein vitamins minerals amino acids fats unidentified growth factors fatty acids genetic engineering climate change food security agribusiness fresh produce desertification  nanoliposomes solid lipid nanoparticles nanoemulsions