What a Little Vitamin A Could Do

In the town of Koundara in northern Guinea, Amadou Bailo holding one end of a stick and his daughter, Mariama, holds the other. She has never been able to attend school because she spends her days guiding her father.

Nicholas Kristof talks about an issue that really bothers me...Vit A deficiency. I have seen much unneccesary blindness in the developing world for the lack of access to a 2 cent capsule. On my last trip to Sierra Leone, vitaminangels supplied me with much Vit A to distribute, which probably was just as important as any of the surgeries I did in terms of preventing blindness.
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I’m bouncing across West Africa in the back of a Land Cruiser with the winner of my “win-a-trip” contest, Paul Bowers, a student at the University of South Carolina, talking about wonky ways to tackle global poverty — such as vitamin A capsules.

Americans pretty much take vitamin A for granted, but many of the world’s poorest people lack it. And as a result, it is estimated that more than half-a-million children die or go blind each year. There’s a simple fix: vitamin A capsules that cost about 2 cents each.
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Americans sometimes don’t want to help poor countries because of doubts about whether aid works. There are legitimate doubts about the effectiveness of many aid efforts, but there also are extraordinary triumphs that don’t get attention — such as the war on blindness.

Which leads us back to vitamin A.
In the major Sierra Leone city of Bo, which is about a three-day drive from Koundara, we visited the Paul School for the Blind, an audacious private institution that struggles to educate blind children in one of the world’s poorest countries. Some of its students were congenitally blind — and one girl had plastic melted into her eyes by rebel soldiers — but 80 percent of the students had lost their sight for reasons related to vitamin A deficiency.

According to the United Nations, half of the children in many African countries are deficient in vitamin A (which comes from liver, mangos, orange-fleshed sweet potatoes and dark, green leafy vegetables), and a disease like measles will quickly deplete their supply further and trigger blindness. The upshot is that vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of child blindness in the world today.

Health wonks have found that vitamin A supplements reduce not only blindness, but also death from diarrhea and other diseases. A review by Unicef and Helen Keller International reports that in areas such as West Africa where many children lack the vitamin, child mortality drops by approximately 23 percent after vitamin A capsules are distributed to children.

“Addressing vitamin A deficiency may be the most cost-effective intervention you can implement,” said Mr. Baker of Helen Keller International.