BACKGROUND A healthy diet is important for normal growth and development. Exposure to undernutrition during important developmental periods such as childhood and adolescence can have effects later in life. Inhabitants of the west of the Netherlands were exposed to severe undernutrition during the famine in the last winter of the second World War (1944-1945). OBJECTIVE We investigated if expos...

The number of famine prone regions in the world has been shrinking for centuries. It is currently mainly limited to sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the impact of endemic hunger has not declined and the early twenty-first century seems to be faced with a new threat: global subsistence crises. In this essay I question the concepts of famine and food crisis from different analytical angles: historical and...

B etween 2001 and 2003 the rural population of Malawi experienced widespread hunger. During the same time period, Malawi's HIV prevalence was the eighth highest in the world (UNAIDS 2004). Speculation about the links between famine and the HIV/AIDS epidemic followed. De Waal and White-side (2003) postulated that a " new variant famine " had arisen among a rural population made more vulnerable t...

During 1877 and 1878 much of China was struck by famine, due to a severe drought. More than nine million people perished. In India, at the same time, more than eight million deaths were attributed to famine also caused by a drought. In many districts, a quarter of the population died. Drought in the same period also caused crop failures, scarcity of food or even famine, in north-eastern Brazil,...

BACKGROUND Famines have occurred in all areas of the world in every period of history. Many studies have shown that poor growth and development and adverse environmental conditions in childhood are associated with osteoporosis in later life. However, little information is available on the relation between famine and bone health. METHODS This study examines the hypothesis that past experience ...

HE Chinese winter of 1910-1911 was one of death and discontent: an epidemic of pneumonic plague—the greatest since the Black Death of the fourteenth century—scourged China's three Eastern Provinces (Manchuria), and famine afflicted the Central Provinces. The Manchurian plague claimed some fifty thousand lives in four months, and the famine took thousands more. Not all the hungry died, but no on...

At the end of World War II, a severe 5-mo famine struck the cities in the western part of The Netherlands. At its peak, the rations dropped to as low as 400 calories per day. In 1972, cognitive performance in 19-y-old male conscripts was reported not to have been affected by exposure to the famine before birth. In the present study, we show that cognitive function in later life does seem affect...

Epidemiology Kwashiorkor is almost never seen in the developed world. Widespread in sub-Saharan Africa and common in Southeast Asia and Central America, kwashiorkor occurs in young children living in areas with endemic food insecurity or famine; prevalence varies by geographic area, with reported levels ranging up to 6% in some chronic foodinsecure communities and occasionally to one quarter of...

In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused up to a million deaths. The crisis was brought on by drought from repeated rainfall failure, poor economic policies and civil war. But what of the survivors? This paper estimates the longterm impact of the famine twenty years later, on young men and women who experienced this severe shock as small children during th...

Even in the digital age, access to literature and other information for people with print impairments remains extremely poor, especially in the developing world. Reading access holds cascading implications for education, economic empowerment, social participation and self-worth. In June 2013 member states of WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) concluded a landmark treaty to redu...