May 24, 2006

Dear All,

I wrote a letter last week and mentioned ready to use therapeutic food (RUTF), and someone wrote back wanting to know more. So here goes.

RUTF is a food supplement developed by a pediatrician in Blantyre, Dr. Mark Mattingly, to try to make a high quality food product to feed to malnourished kids from things locally available. He produced and tested a product made from peanut butter, powdered milk, and sugar and tested it in nutrition rehabilitation units, finding it to be extremely effective. The advantages for most of us, other than that it works extremely well, is that it can be given to the mothers to take home, eliminating the need to cook supplementary meals for malnourished children. When you realize that the mothers are also caring for other children, tilling their fields, carrying firewood, walking to the hospital to visit sick children, and so forth, RUTF makes a huge difference to the nutritional rehabilitation that is possible for these kids. The siblings are also usually malnourished, and this enables the mothers to be at home to care for them instead of leaving them alone to attend to a more seriously malnourished child in a nutrition center or hospital.

Another advantage is that, especially during “hunger season,” the hospital staff is overwhelmed with the needs of malnourished kids, who are supposed to be fed five to eight times a day. So the RUTF product would enable us to feed the hospitalized kids much better as well. The large donor agencies are beginning to see the advantages of such a product, which accounts for the seminar I recently attended where they discussed how it can be used.

There are still some obstacles. Two disadvantages of the product: (1) It is comparatively expensive, about five to ten dollars for a week for one child, depending on the size and nutritional requirements. (2) We still need a micronutrient mixture that has to be imported. We looked into making it at Nkhoma, but due to the micronutrients, at present this will not be possible. I also think once the big donors get involved we wouldn’t be able to make it any cheaper than they can provide it. At present, it’s limited by supply and demand, as the product has also been proposed for HIV patients and TB patients—anyone who is malnourished.

There is ongoing research about using various other primary agents such as soya, chick peas, and so forth, so this is an unfolding story. To investigate its properties further, this summer we hope to compare an enriched soya porridge with the RUTF in adults.

Blessings to all!

Barbara

The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 337