Prevalence Of Vitamin A Deficiency Among Children Under Five Years Of Age In Nigeria

The deficiency of Vitamin A increases child vulnerability to stunting whose effects are permanent if not managed early and spilling over into adulthood.  The study aimed to measure the prevalence of vitamin a deficiency among children under five years of age in Nigeria. The study design was descriptive cross-sectional survey. The target population was children under-fives and the sample size was   207 however there was a non-response of two making the response rate 99.03% which is still considered valid. Interview schedule was used to gather information from the caretakers and mothers of under-fives children in the study and anthropometric measurement was used to collect data on height/length for age of the target children.

The respondent was selected randomly. SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) was used to evaluate statistics. The routine coverage for under-fives was found to be 51.2%. Study findings also revealed the prevalence of stunting was high at 63.4% among children who did not receive vitamin A supplement as compared to those who were supplemented (36.6%). Further analysis indicated that there was substantial (0.036) association between the supplement and nutritional status of the target group. The study concludes that the outcome of the vitamin A routine supplementation had effect on both occurrences of morbidity and children nutritional status in Nigeria.

The study recommends the  need for the national, county government and health stakeholders to strategies and put more effort to accelerate and establish platforms that enhance service delivery at the community level such as Baby Friendly Community Initiative through community strategy to address the poor coverage and insufficient doses , and also to improve availability of the vitamin A stocks  at the health facility level since it’s one of the factors that is highly influential  in supplementation as identified in the study.