MSF Myanmar

Malnutrition Awareness Week is a global event hosted annually in different countries on different dates. This initiative is an opportunity to increase knowledge about malnutrition as a public healthcare issue.

Malnutrition refers to deficiencies, excesses, or imbalances in a person's intake of energy and/or nutrients. That includes undernutrition where the body is not getting enough nutrients, and overnutrition by excessive consumption of nutrients. Most vulnerable population to malnutrition is people with chronic diseases like TB and HIV as they need more nutrients, yet these diseases impact nutrition. Children, especially in the first five years of life, are also vulnerable to malnutrition as they undergo rapid physical and cognitive development that requires a higher intake of essential nutrients.

While their body needs a high intake of nutrition, the children’s small stomachs have limited capacity to receive it. When they develop malnutrition, they would need nutrient dense foods. One of the therapeutic foods MSF and other humanitarian actors widely used to fight malnutrition in children is Plumpy Nut.

MSF used plumpy nut in the 2000s in children which revolutionized care and treatment of malnutrition in an outpatient basis, where large scale interventions were made possible and child mortalities due to malnutrition was hugely decreased especially in humanitarian emergencies. Nowadays, Plumpy’ Nut is also used to support people living with HIV and people with Tuberculosis who are malnourished. Nutrition plays an important role in good treatment outcomes.

MSF started supporting malnourished children in Yangon in 1993 by establishing therapeutic feeding centers in Hlaingtharyar Township. Over the past three decades, addressing malnutrition has been a cornerstone of MSF's work on HIV and TB in Myanmar, with supplementary feeding playing a key role in patient care.