As more severely malnourished children and their mothers trickled into Port-au-Prince Monday from Haiti's southeastern region to obtain life-saving treatment, the Ministry of Health and an international anti-hunger aid organization launched a national survey of children's nutritional health.

The door-to-door survey is the first of its kind since the 1970s, officials say, and is critical to answering the lingering question: How widespread and acute is malnutrition among children in hurricane-battered Haiti?

The survey also comes as the Ministry of Health seeks to open a clinic in Baie d'Orange, an isolated mountain village, where 26 children died from severe malnutrition and dozens more from the town and neighboring villages were hospitalized in recent weeks.

''The study is very important in the current situation, as it will give us a baseline . . . and it can guide the geographical priorities for the treatment sites,'' Dr. Teresa de la Torre, the nutrition and health specialist for UNICEF Haiti, said in a telephone interview.

On Monday, just days after Doctors Without Borders returned nine severely malnourished children to their homes in the Baie d'Orange region, a nurse with the humanitarian aid organization drove into Port-au-Prince with three more children from Mapou, a neighboring town.

Max Cosci, the head of Doctors Without Borders/Belgium mission, said the children were not as close to death at the previous group ``but they are malnourished.''

For more than three weeks now, the mission has been going door-to-door in the southeast surveying the nutritional health of children after growing concern that the severe malnutrition problem may be more widespread than Baie d'Orange and its surrounding villages.

Though Doctors Without Borders have yet to come upon a case as extreme as Baie d'Orange elsewhere in the southeast, Cosci said they did find another pocket of moderately malnourished children in a town where they least expected it.

''We were sure we were not going to find anything there,'' he said. ``There is a town, markets for people to buy food. But we found a good group of kids in moderate malnutrition.''

Such discoveries has sounded the alarm for Haiti's Health Ministry and the international donor community. They agreed to do the survey even before a series of two hurricanes and two tropical storms pounded the country in less than a month this summer. The county was already realing from a food crisis that sparked days of deadly rioting when the first storm hit in August.

Now, the compounded crisis makes it more urgent to find out how children are being impacted, officials say.

By surveying Haiti, province-by-province, the plan is to have a complete ''nutritional picture of the country,'' said Olivier Le Guillou, country director for Action Against Hunger, which is conducting the survey in cooperation with the Ministry of Health.

The survey is being paid for by UNICEF and the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office. Le Guillou said it will provide a more accurate picture of the rapid assesments a number of aid groups have done in recent weeks. Those assesments show that the malnutrition rates have skyrocketed in hurricane-affected areas, with severe rates five to six times higher in isolated hardest-hit communities like Baie d'Orange.

''We are not saying that what they are doing is not good, but it's less accurate for sure,'' Le Guillou said.

Mari Tolliver, spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy, said the U.S. Agency for International Development ``is aware of differences in the methodologies used during the rapid assessments to assess the impact of food insecurity.

``However, we do not think that these differences diminish the gravity of the situation in certain areas of the country that were particularly hard-hit by the storms.''

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