Some good news

[jenk]

From the Wall Street Journal By Roger Thurow :

EL GENEINA, Sudan -- Four-year-old Sadia Mohamed Yousif walked 25 miles with her family to the Krinding refugee camp here. Violence ravaging the surrounding Darfur province had driven them from their farm and Sadia was near starvation when aid workers began feeding her a new product made of sweet, enriched peanut-butter paste.

Its name is Plumpy'nut, and as its use becomes more widespread, this whimsical-sounding product is helping transform the treatment of malnutrition in children. Each packet, the size of a small juice pouch, weighs less than 100 grams but packs 500 calories. After several weeks on a diet of Plumpy'nut -- brought to the camp by Save the Children, a U.S. aid organization -- Sadia was able to stand and walk again. When she spied the silver-and-red packet in her mother's hand, she said "Plumpy," stepping forward on wobbly legs and reaching out her hands.

"Plumpy saved her," said her mother, Fatma, with a broad smile. [...]

Made by a French company in the Normandy countryside, Plumpy'nut has been fed to some 30,000 children in Sudan's Darfur region and aid officials there say it has helped cut malnutrition rates in half.

Unlike powdered-milk formulas, which have been the standard treatment for severe malnutrition, Plumpy'nut doesn't need to be mixed with clean water, a rare commodity in famine-stricken regions. Medical officers aren't needed to be on hand to mix ingredients. A mother simply snips a corner of the packet and squeezes the paste into her child's mouth. As a result, nutritionists for the first time can take treatment beyond crowded emergency feeding centers and hospital settings, where disease can spread rapidly, and into the communities where malnourished children live. [...]

Plumpy'nut is made by Nutriset SAS, a private company specializing in food for humanitarian relief. With 40 employees working from a small blue-and-white factory in Malaunay, France -- a country otherwise known for its haute cuisine -- Nutriset also makes milk-based formulas for treating severe malnourishment as well as other nutrition-boosting products.

While other food companies seek to sell their yogurt and breakfast cereal to the widest possible consumer market, Nutriset focuses only on the world's hunger zones. Its products are household names in places such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Congo and Malawi. Its main customers are aid agencies. In this niche, Nutriset has few rivals. Competing products such as enriched biscuits aren't as versatile as Plumpy'nut -- which costs relief agencies about 35 cents a packet before shipping -- many aid workers say. [...]

One morning in 1997, while eating breakfast, [Nutriset's founder] noticed a jar of Nutella, the chocolate-hazelnut spread popular in Europe. He had seen it on breakfast tables, including his own, for years, but this time he recalls thinking, "Of course!" .... Since the previous experiment with chocolate didn't work, Mr. Briend tried a peanut paste. When the ingredients from the F-100 milk formula were added, it still tasted like peanut butter, only sweeter. [...] In many African countries, the peanut is a staple food and Nutriset found no cases of peanut allergy. Nutritionists began deploying Plumpy'nut in hunger hot-spots. Children, delighted at the taste, gobbled it up. "The children cried when we took the Plumpy'nut away in order to weigh them," recalls Mr. Briend.

Armed with Plumpy'nut, aid agencies are developing a new treatment method. During Ethiopia's latest famine, in 2003, which afflicted more than 12 million people, relief organizations erected a network of feeding centers to administer milk-based treatment. Countless lives were saved, but medical workers were overwhelmed by the crush of children filling the centers. Aid workers using Plumpy'nut were able to relieve the pressure by returning children to their homes and treating them there. [...]

Some groups want to take the production of Plumpy'nut beyond Nutriset's factory and into the field... Dr. Manary initially used Plumpy'nut he'd received as a donation in 2001. Recovery rates soared to 95% from 25%. "We didn't need a statistician to tell us this was better," he says.