Malnutrition kills 6m children annually

Malnutrition kills nearly 6 million children a year, mainly in developing countries, despite the availability of relatively cheap solutions that could improve global nutrition, a report said yesterday.

While low and middle-income countries bear the brunt of the problem, malnutrition affects some rich countries as well, said the report by the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington policy research group.

The bureau's "2007 World Population Data Sheet" and two companion reports provide up-to-date demographic, health and environmental data for all the countries and major regions of the world.