Maize meal fortification is associated with improved vitamin A and iron status in adolescents and reduced childhood anaemia in a food aid-dependent refugee population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To assess changes in the Fe and vitamin A status of the population of Nangweshi refugee camp associated with the introduction of maize meal fortification. DESIGN: Pre- and post-intervention study using a longitudinal cohort. SETTING: Nangweshi refugee camp, Zambia. SUBJECTS: Two hundred and twelve adolescents (10-19 years), 157 children (6-59 months) and 118 women (20-49 years) were selected at random by household survey in July 2003 and followed up after 12 months. RESULTS: Maize grain was milled and fortified in two custom-designed mills installed at a central location in the camp and a daily ration of 400 g per person was distributed twice monthly to households as part of the routine food aid ration. During the intervention period mean Hb increased in children (0.87 g/dl; P < 0.001) and adolescents (0.24 g/dl; P = 0.043) but did not increase in women. Anaemia decreased in children by 23.4% (P < 0.001) but there was no significant change in adolescents or women. Serum transferrin receptor (log10-transformed) decreased by -0.082 microg/ml (P = 0.036) indicating an improvement in the Fe status of adolescents but there was no significant decrease in the prevalence of deficiency (-8.5%; P = 0.079). In adolescents, serum retinol increased by 0.16 micromol/l (P < 0.001) and vitamin A deficiency decreased by 26.1% (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The introduction of fortified maize meal led to a decrease in anaemia in children and a decrease in vitamin A deficiency in adolescents. Centralised, camp-level milling and fortification of maize meal is a feasible and pertinent intervention in food aid operations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".