MEDIA is crammed with political pap. So, who listens to the whimpers from the 7th National Nutrition Survey?

Like the 5th and 6th surveys, this Food and Nutrition Research Institute study documents savaging of this country’s children and breast-feeding mothers. But “shriveling away from hunger is not the stuff of headlines.”

Yet, we must heed those weak voices above the din from Tomas, Greg to Atan and Augustus. Otherwise, we lose our humanity.

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Nutrition adequacy barely budged from cellar-levels of 2003 or 2005. “There are more undernourished children and nutritionally at-risk pregnant and lactating women today” than there were six years ago.

Today, out of every hundred pre-schoolers, 26 are underweight. Another 28 didn’t come up to their expected normal height. And six were thin.

“From 2005 to 2008, a significant increase in the proportion of underweight (24.6 percent to 26.2 percent) and under height (26.3 percent to 27.9 percent) among preschoolers was noted.”

Scrub the jargon. That means: kids below 5 years today are more emaciated, shorter and skinnier than they used to be.

For infants, the crucial time is when still in the womb, and surviving until 5. Ensure mothers get adequate nutrition and pre-natal care. That jacks up chances for babies scrunching into stunted dwarfs.

“Many of the things we need can wait,” Nobel Laureate Gabriel Mistral wrote. “The child can not wait. Now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood made, his sinews developed. To him, we can not say: tomorrow. His name is today.”

Over the last three years, however, the proportion of “nutritionally at-risk” (i.e. ill-fed) pregnant women hasn’t shrunk. The number instead inched up (1.7 percent). “Prevalence of underweight” women who breast-fed became smaller. But the reduction was miniscule: from 13.9 percent to 13.1 percent.

Already, the 6th Survey found four out of ten women, who breast-fed, were anemic. Six out of 10 infants, up to a year old, were anemic. Surprise? It would dwindle later. But irreversible damage had been inflicted by then.

PEM (protein energy malnutrition) sends too many Filipino pre-school children to premature graves, ADB and World Bank said in: “Early Child Development.”

Proportions of Filipino infants who die are larger than in poorer Bangaldesh, Kenya or Tanzania. That is the glossed over scandal.

The 7th Survey means the lethal cycle continues: The ill-fed today give birth to wizened infants who will mother the next generation of dwarfed babies.

Ill-fed kids are deprived from “10 to 14 percent of their potential intelligence quotient (IQ).” Scientists dub this “cognitive deficits.” That is “mental capacity missing a few buttons on the remote.” That loss can never be recovered.”

So, will our kids be scrawnier, shorter, frailer-–and less adept—than their Malaysian, Korean or Singaporean counterparts? Yes, if our officials persist in greed that denies the kids and mothers needed resources.

Clean water reduces infant deaths by 23 percent, a study of 15 countries show. Peru proved that installation of a flush toilet cuts death rates by 59percent. Fortifying rice or pan de sal with micro-nutrients saves IQs.

One wishes gains in nutrition would match the rate whereby political fortunes here bloat. President Arroyo’s declared net worth bolted from P66.8 million to P143.54 million in eight years. Her son Mikey’s worth rose from P5 million in his in 2002 to P99 million last year.

“Do you hear the children crying, O my brothers/ ‘Ere sorrows come with the years?”