PEACE & LIGHT

Vitamins In High Places

In the 1980s, high rates of blindness and infant mortality in Nepal were traced to a lack of vitamin A in the diet. The solution—an occasional inexpensive vitamin A capsule—appeared easy. But it wasn’t. Someone would have to make sure that children and pregnant women actually took the pills. RAM SHRESTHA, N90, returned to his native land in 1991, when the vitamin program was new. He had some ideas, the most inspired of which was to call upon the real heavyweights of Nepalese society, the grandmothers. He knew that if grandma gives you a pill, you take it. Today more than 48,000 grandmothers in Nepal are distributing vitamin A. Infant mortality has been cut in half, and the incidence of eye disease among pregnant women has dropped from 23 percent to 3 percent.