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India Battles Malnutrition with Local Product
Inside a small shack in Mumbai’s largest slum, Dr. Evelet Sequeira struggles to coax a 3-year-old girl onto a baby scale.
Sequeira is with a local aid organization called SNEHA that wants to know how many children in the slum have slipped from a stage of moderate malnutrition to what’s known as severe acute malnutrition.
“She looks malnourished,” says Sequeira, lifting the girl into her arms. “If you can see the hands and feet – very thin, a potbelly. So she must be on the borderline.”
Eight million children in India suffer from severe acute malnutrition, according to the Indian government.
But when it comes to treating those children, India lacks what many consider one of the best tools available: so-called ready-to-use therapeutic foods. These are the type of pre-packaged, protein-rich nutritional products that have brought “a revolution in the treatment of severe malnutrition” to Africa, says Stéphane Doyon of the group Doctors Without Borders.
That revolution was led by the most well known therapeutic food, Plumpy’Nut, made by the French company Nutriset. It’s a patented concoction of peanut butter and micro-nutrients that allows severely malnourished children to be treated at home instead of at a hospital…
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2012-10-30 00:01:59
Source: http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2012/10/india-battles-malnutrition-with-local.html
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