The COVID-19 pandemic and child malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa: A scoping review
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Abstract
Background
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in lower reported number of cases and deaths within the paediatric population, indirect impacts on the health of children in Sub-Saharan Africa such as malnutrition are evident. Data on the socioeconomic factors affecting malnutrition in the under-age population of Sub-Saharan Africa brought by the COVID-19 pandemic remain limited. This paper assesses socioeconomic factors of malnutrition in relation with COVID-19 and potential mitigating measures.
Methods
A scoping review of PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science from March 11, 2020, to May 1, 2021, was conducted. The included studies focused on COVID-19, children malnutrition, and Sub-Saharan Africa and adhered to the PRISMA guideline.
Results
Among 73 total screened articles, 15 studies filled the inclusion criteria. The identified socioeconomic factors leading to malnutrition in children were reduction in average income or increase in unemployment rate, access to healthcare and food supplements, disrupted food supply chains and increased prices of food products, pauses in humanitarian responses, and reduced access to school-based meals. Potential mitigation measures were food subsidies, food price control measures, the identification of new vulnerable groups and the implementation of financial interventions.
Conclusion
Malnutrition amongst Sub-Saharan African children due to COVID-19 is a result of a combination of multiple socioeconomic factors. To stabilize household purchasing power and eventually malnutrition in children in SSA, a combined strategy of initial detection of newly developing vulnerable groups and efficient, rapid financial assistance through mobile phone transfers was suggested. These strategies were proposed in combination with other economical models.
Article activity feed
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.07.21.21260929: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources To perform the study at hand, a COVID-19 literature web-scraping tool was applied to allow combined search through common databases such as Pubmed, Embase and Web of Science using predefined syntaxes for identifying relevant literature. Pubmedsuggested: (PubMed, RRID:SCR_004846)Embasesuggested: (EMBASE, RRID:SCR_001650)Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecogni…SciScore for 10.1101/2021.07.21.21260929: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources To perform the study at hand, a COVID-19 literature web-scraping tool was applied to allow combined search through common databases such as Pubmed, Embase and Web of Science using predefined syntaxes for identifying relevant literature. Pubmedsuggested: (PubMed, RRID:SCR_004846)Embasesuggested: (EMBASE, RRID:SCR_001650)Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:One limitation of this paper is that while most studies focused entirely on the SSA region, some studies, while focusing on SSA, observed additional LMICs besides LMICs in SSA. This paper aimed to specifically extract the findings from the SSA region. Nevertheless, this factor could have potentially led to minor interpretation biases.
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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