Health Sciences Communications
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322

Release date: Nov. 8, 999
Contact: Sarah Goodwin, Director, 404-727-3366 or sgoodwi@emory.edu.

Recent Graduate of Nutrition Health Sciences Program Heads to Nepal To Evaluate Nutritional Status of Adolescent Bhutanese Refugees

Nutrition researcher Heidi Michels Blanck, Ph.D., is part of a team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that is assessing the micronutrient and health status of refugees settled into seven camps in the Jhapa and Morang Districts in southeastern Nepal. About 83,000 ethnic Nepalese were displaced from Bhutan between 1990-93 after new Government of Bhutan policy excluded them from the benefits of citizenship. Since that time, the refugees have been subsisting on dry rations with only occasional access to fruits and vegetables. Relief workers attribute several illness outbreaks-particularly the increase in angular stomatitis (related to riboflavin deficiency) to micronutrient deficiencies.

A recent graduate of Emory's Nutrition Health Sciences program, Dr. Blanck is now an epidemiologic intelligence officer with the CDC. She and other team members are making the assessments at the request of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and with the collaboration of Save the Children Foundation-U.K. and the World Health Organization World Food Program.

Dr. Blanck will be focusing on the largest group of refugees: the adolescents from ages 10-19 who make up about half the camp population and who, because of relatively higher metabolic and anabolic demand, may be reservoirs of undetected protein-energy and micronutrient malnutrition-especially deficiencies in iron (related to anemia), vitamin A and riboflavin. The goal of the research is the make recommendations for nutritional interventions.

For information on Nutrition and Health Sciences at Emory see: http://www.biochem.emory.edu/nhs.

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