Fitri – Hundreds of children across West Nusa Tenggara continue to suffer from malnutrition in early childhood, the head of the province's health agency said on Sunday.

Mohamad Ismail said that last year the province recorded 756 cases of children suffering from malnutrition, including severe forms of protein-energy malnutrition such as marasmus and kwashiorkor.

"This figure was arrived at from data collected from 10 districts in West Nusa Tenggara," he said. "Of those 756 children, 25 have since died."

Ismail added that his office recorded an average of 60 cases of malnutrition in children under the age of 5 each month last year. He said these figures still showed a decline from previous years.

There were 926 cases recorded during 2009 and 1,207 cases in 2008. Ismail said, however, that there was still a lot of work to be done, particularly in the districts of West and Central Lombok.

He said children suffering from malnutrition tended to come from the families of migrant workers. He said parents, usually mothers, left their children in the care of elderly relatives who often failed to provide adequate nutrition for the children.

"According to my office's records, the primary cause of malnutrition in these children is inadequate, or total lack of, feeding by grandmothers or elderly aunts, who have been left to care for the children by parents who are working abroad as migrant workers," he said.

"In some cases, we found grandmothers were feeding children the same food they were eating themselves," he said. "These diets were completely lacking in the nutrients required for growing children."

Ismail said some of the cases handled by his office were so bad that the agency was considering asking the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration to ban parents with children under the age of 5 from working abroad unless they could first show proof that their children's nutritional needs would be taken care of.

Nuraini, a young girl begging on the streets of Mataram, the provincial capital, was carrying a baby in her arms. She said the baby, who had a swollen stomach, patchy hair and swollen eyes, was not hers.

"This is my niece, her mother is a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia," Nurani said. "I bring her with me when I beg, because nobody is taking care of her at home. My grandmother is also sick," she said

Khairul Anwar, a health official in West Nusa Tenggara, said one of the biggest worries was that malnourished children were more susceptible to diseases like diarrhea, tuberculosis, pneumonia and heart and respiratory problems.

It is a problem he said his office was trying to deal with. "One of the greatest killers in children suffering from malnutrition is uncontrollable diarrhea," Khairul said.

In January 2010, a United Nations Children's Fund report found that at least 7.6 million Indonesian children under the age of 5 – or one out of every three – suffered from stunted growth, a primary manifestation of malnutrition.

The report ranked Indonesia as having the fifth largest number of children under the age of 5 suffering from stunted growth worldwide.