MSF teams see the devastating impact of childhood malnutrition every day, having treated more than 150,000 children in 99 programmes in 2006. Malnutrition weakens resistance and increases the risk of dying from pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles and AIDS, five diseases that are responsible for half of all deaths in children under five.

It’s not only about how much food children get, it’s what’s in the food that counts. Deprived of essential nutrients a young child will stop growing. Those that survive are often scarred by long-term consequences that include stunted growth and developmental delays, as well as an increased risk of chronic disease and lower life expectancies as adults.

If nutritional deficiencies become intense a child will begin to waste – to consume its own tissues to obtain needed nutrients. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are 20 million young children with severe acute malnutrition at any given point in time.

Therapeutic ready-to-use food (RUF) is highly effective in curing malnutrition. It comes in individually wrapped rations that are resistant to bacterial infections, and are easy to distribute. It contains all the necessary nutrients, vitamins, and minerals that a young child needs.

What are the issues?

• Food is not enough to reduce the five million annual deaths worldwide related to malnutrition in children under five.

• There is a new strategy to treat malnourished children with therapeutic ready-to-use food (RUF) but only about 3% of 20 million children who need it are getting it.

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.

• Competition needs to be fostered for existing producers of therapeutic RUF and companies should be encouraged to develop new therapeutic products.

• 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