The 16 Latin American participants attending the workshop exchanged the latest scientific information on the sickness and also had a chance to interact with their counterparts from Canada's Animal Disease Research Institute. From 8 to 10 October, the UNU held an international workshop on the control of iron deficiency. Iron deficiency can cause anaemia. Perhaps a third of all men and two-thirds of women in poor countries are anaemic. Their largely vegetarian diets often contain much less usable iron than meat does, and stomach parasites such as hookworms siphon off a lot of the iron that is consumed.
Anaemia causes diminished mental and physical capacities.
The workshop explored new ways of supplementing and distributing iron-enhanced food. And the UNU is offering two upcoming courses in November. It is being held in Santiago and will give young food professionals a chance to improve their leadership skills so that they can better carry out their functions as teachers, planners and nutritional advocates. It is being held in Havana and will teach participants about such techniques as extracting RNA from B cells, sequencing DNA and cloning single-chain fragment vectors. All of these UNU training courses are helping to eliminate the health hazards that make a poor person's life so precarious.