Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
London (Agenzia Fides) - A series on maternal and child undernutrition in the current issue of the medical journal, The Lancet, correctly puts the spotlight on nutrition as “a desperately neglected aspect of maternal, newborn, and child health”. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams are confronted daily with the devastating impact of childhood malnutrition, having treated more than 150,000 children in 99 programmes in 2006. The organisation’s medical staff see first-hand how malnutrition weakens children’s resistance and increases the risk of dying from pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles and AIDS. They have also documented the dramatic impact of nutrient-dense, ready-to-use food (RUF) in treating childhood malnutrition.
MSF has been treating acute malnutrition with ready-to-use food since 2000 in African and Asian countries including Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Niger and Sudan. Outpatient/home-based strategies have permitted MSF to treat far more children than would have been possible in the past, when hospital-based treatment was the standard of care.
Results have been most closely monitored in MSF’s programme in Maradi, Niger, where hundreds of thousands of patients have been treated since 2001. In 2007, over 22,000 severely malnourished children were treated with a cure rate of 84 percent and a mortality rate of less than three percent.
Large-scale outpatient treatment of severe acute malnutrition is being successfully implemented by ministries of health, with support from implementing partners in Malawi, Ethiopia and Niger. However, despite strong UN recommendations to implement RUF treatment strategies, only about three percent of children with severe acute malnutrition have access to therapeutic RUF today. Dossier in Italian to promote use of ready-to-use food to fight childhood malnutrition relative to MSF “Food is not enough” campaign:
http://www.medicisenzafrontiere.it/msfinforma/comunicati_stampa/Dossier_Stampa_Nut.pdf
(AP) (25/1/2008 Agenzia Fides; Righe:29; Parole:332)
