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MSF and Malnutrition

MSF teams see the devastating impact of childhood malnutrition every day, having treated more than 150,000 children per year in 2006 and 2007. Malnutrition weakens resistance and increases the risk of dying from pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles or AIDS, five diseases that are responsible for half of the 9.8 million deaths in children under five every year.


© Marta Cazorla


What are we doing in the field ?

MSF has been using ready-to-use foods (RUFs) in its malnutrition projects to combat childhood malnutrition for some years. The results have been very good and many young lives saved. For instance in 2005, a year of exceptional food insecurity in Niger. MSF treated over sixty thousand severely malnourished children using RUFs. Thirty eight thousand were treated in the Maradi project alone with a 90% cure rate. Read more

Reaching more children with a two-tiered approach (2007)
Since 2007, MSF has begun using the WHO 2006 growth standards to define admission criteria for treatment for acute malnutrition This standard identifies more, and younger, acutely malnourished children. WHO standards allow us to better reach those malnourished children most at risk of death.

Children suffering from severe acute malnutrition are treated with therapeutic RUFs in outpatient feeding centres. Only children with complicating conditions still need to be hospitalised.

The second component of MSF's new approach involves distribution of supplemental RUFs, which complements regular meals and compensates for
deficiencies in their regular diet. In 2007, MSF distributed supplemental RUFs to all 62,000 children from six months to three years of age in one district in Maradi in Niger on a monthly basis during the seasonal hunger gap that precedes the harvest.

“What our intervention has shown is that in areas with high seasonal peaks of childhood malnutrition, we have to act early and ensure that children are getting the adequate nutrients they need, rather than wait for the kids to be treated for malnutrition, a condition which can lead to long term poor health, disabilities or death.” says Stéphane Doyon, MSF Nutrition Team Leader.

Read more about the report on this pilot project

Global picture
While there is a new international strategy in place to treat malnourished children with therapeutic ready-to-use food (RUF) only about 3% of 20 million children who need it are getting it. Production of RUFs must be scaled up to allow this strategy to be implemented.

What needs to happen ?

  • Treatment of severe acute malnutrition with therapeutic RUF must be scaled up. Countries must develop protocols that support community-based management of severe acute malnutrition. Countries must adopt and implement the new WHO Growth Standards.
  • Funding schemes must be developed to support Ministries of Health to integrate treatment of severe acute malnutrition into their protocols and to purchase therapeutic RUF at a price that will not break budgets.
  • Donors need to review the quality of food aid addressed towards rapidly growing young children to ensure that distributions include foods that meet their specific nutritional needs.
  • Academic and operational research must increase in order to drive the development of new complementary and supplementary foods and programme strategies aimed at meeting nutritional needs of young children, women of reproductive age and people with tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS

What is MSF doing?

  • MSF is raising awareness of the devastation acute malnutrition causes in terms of infant mortality in “malnutrition hotspots” (Sahel, Horn of Africa and South Asia) and of the current unavailability of effective curative intervention.
  • MSF is pushing health ministries, international organisations and other NGOs to adopt new protocols validated by WHO/UNICEF/WFP and rapidly step up the utilisation of therapeutic RUF for the most vulnerable/at risk children.
  • MSF is calling on Donors and UN agencies to revisit the food that is given as a part of food aid programmes, and for new strategies of delivering essential nutrients to be developed and scaled up.

Read more

What is malnutrition

Global burden of malnutrition

Why Food is Not Enough