As of 2004, vitamin A deficiency was one of the 19 leading causes of death worldwide.
Vitamin A tends to concentrate in relatively expensive foods — if a family can’t even regularly afford eggs for their child, this becomes a real, tangible problem, not an abstract one.
A study looking at children in Manisa — a comparatively well-off part of Turkey — found deficiency in about 11% of children studied (source). A separate, earlier study on children in Ankara found deficiency in roughly 30% (source).
In various lower-income countries, where a healthy diet is often financially out of reach for families, vitamin A supplementation is sometimes administered almost like a vaccine — a direct medical intervention standing in for what proper nutrition would otherwise provide.
Per Wikipedia’s entry on vitamin A: vitamin A deficiency is estimated to affect roughly a third of children under five worldwide, and is linked to as many as 670,000 deaths of children under five each year.
I couldn’t find reliable statistics on how many children this has affected in Turkey specifically — as far as I can tell, that data simply isn’t tracked or published.
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