PESHAWAR - Experts here have called upon the health professionals to scale up the level of public awareness regarding mother and child health to put brakes on the rising infant and maternal mortality rate in the province. All the pregnant and lactating mothers should be prescribed folic acid to put brakes on malnutrition in infants, said Dr Saeed Anwar, Director Prime Foundation, while speaking at the end of a three-day workshop entitled 'Community Management of Acute Malnutrition, in Kuwait Teaching Hospital on Sunday. About 54 per cent of deaths occurred in malnourished people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, he said, adding that such deaths could be avoided through awareness. The malnourished infants and children should be referred to the district headquarters hospitals for management, he said. The new technique called CMAM aims to control malnutrition through community-based interventions and social mobilization, he said. Awareness was key to avoidance of malnutrition, he said. The workshop participants are team members of a new project of Prime Foundation, which aims to address the malnutrition problems in Charsadda. The project is being run through funding provided by Pakistan Islamic Medical Association in collaboration and Al-Khidmat Foundation, Charsadda. He said that mothers should be educated about balanced diet so they can prepare home-based meals, which are necessary for physical and mental growth of the children. Immunization played significant part in child health as vaccination of childbearing women and kids had eradicated all childhood vaccine-preventable ailments around the globe. The medical professionals have responsibility to inform the people about the risk associated with non-vaccination of children and mothers, he said. He also informed that malnutrition caused low-immunity that led to host of childhood diseases like night blindness, diarrhoeal diseases, measles, acute respiratory infections, diseases of the skin, bones and joints etc. The CMAM seeks to early diagnosis and management of acute malnutrition among children less than five years of age and pregnant and lactating women at the community level with a proper referral system to the tehsil and district level health facility, Dr. Anwar Jamal, master trainer, said. Under the initiative, the health workers conduct community-based survey and register children and women suffering from malnutrition and then provide them assistance, he said. The approach, he said had achieved remarkable achievement in neighbouring countries and hoped that it was a better way to control the mother and child problems. He also shed light on the causes of malnutrition, techniques of anthropometrical measurement and clinical manifestations of malnutrition and stressed the need social mobilization, advocacy, mapping and health education of the community. Nauman Akhtar, another facilitator of the workshop, said that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has a high mortality rate due to malnutrition and cited illiteracy and poverty as main reasons. Stomach-related ailments also lead to male nutrition, which can be avoided by taking clean food and water, he said, adding that malnutrition caused several health problems among children as well as other marginalized population.