[In Focus] Pattanee Winichagoon—tackling malnutrition in rural Thailand

“Back then, the health perspective seemed to be that anaemia is something that needs treatment, that it's curative instead of preventative”, explains Pattanee Winichagoon, Associate Professor and Senior Adviser to the Institute of Nutrition, Mahidol University, Thailand. From her fieldwork experience with pregnant women in rural Thailand in the 1980s, she recalls that anaemia was as high as 35% in pregnant women in Thailand. “The problem of anaemia was certainly identified as a very serious one”, says Winichagoon, and she was keen to understand why it was so difficult to establish iron supplementation programmes in these communities.