An epidemiological study of pre-school child malnutrition in Santo Domingo

This report describes the differences in social and demographic characteristics of 82 mothers with a severely malnourished child under the age of five years and those of 82 mothers with a healthy child matched by age, sex, and neighborhood of residence. The mothers of the healthy children had a mean parity of 4.7 live births. There was no significant difference in the proportion of women in the two groups currently using contraception, but more women of the control group had undergone one or more spontaneous or induced abortions. More children of the control group had been immunized against one one or more communicable diseases than the children of the case group. The proportion of children of school age attending school was greater on the part of the children in the control group than the children of the case group although the difference was not significant (p = 0.06). Despite the authors' efforts to assure that the women of the control group were selected from the same socioeconomic class as the women of the case group, there was some evidence that the women of the control group enjoyed somewhat higher family incomes.