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Wasting Policy Brief

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Wasting Policy Brief WHO/NMH/NHD/14.8 Global Nutrition Targets 2025 Wasting Policy Brief TARGET: Reduce and maintain childhood wasting to less than 5% Gates/Peter DiCampo WHAT’S AT STAKE In 2012, the World Health Assembly Resolution 65.6 endorsed a Comprehensive implementation plan on maternal, infant and young child nutrition (1), which specified six global nutrition targets for 2025 (2). This policy brief covers the sixth target: reduce and maintain childhood wasting to less than 5%. The purpose of this policy brief is to increase attention to, investment in, and action for a set of cost-effective interventions and policies that can help Member States and their partners to reduce and maintain the rate of childhood wasting. he global target for 2025 will be achieved if high- lose too much of their body weight. It will be difficult burden countries take stock of their current to continue improving rates of child survival without T prevalence, projected population growth, improvements in the proportion of wasted children underlying causes of wasting and the resources available receiving timely and appropriate life-saving treatment, to address them; set target annual reduction rates to alongside reductions in the number of children becoming guide intervention efforts; mobilize necessary resources; wasted in the first place (prevention). and develop and implement systematic plans for the reduction of wasting. In addition, all countries need to The World Health Organization (WHO) classifies examine inequalities among populations and identify wasting in children as severe or moderate, according priority actions for particular vulnerable or marginalized to the WHO growth reference for weight-for-height (3). groups, where there are clusters of large numbers of This definition does not include children with bilateral wasting children. Such an equity-inspired approach is pitting oedema – a form of acute undernutrition that both an ethical imperative and a judicious investment results from similar causal pathways to wasting. Wasting strategy. is a reduction or loss of body weight in relation to height. Acute malnutrition in children aged 6 to 59 Wasting is a major health problem and, owing to its months can be either moderate or severe. Severe acute associated risks for morbidity, requires urgent attention malnutrition is defined as severe wasting (low weight- from policy-makers and programme implementers alike. for-height) and/or mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) Addressing wasting is of critical importance because of <115 mm and/or bilateral pitting oedema. Moderate acute the heightened risk of disease and death for children who malnutrition is defined as moderate wasting and/or MUAC ≥115 mm and <125 mm. It is estimated that, at any point currently falling short of the target and an additional in time in the world, 52 million children aged under 5 78 countries for which data are not available (2). years are wasted, with 17 million of those estimated to Furthermore, in the 49 countries that reported wasting be severely wasted, based on national-level prevalence of less than 5%, data were not available to confirm that data (4). It is important to note that these estimates may levels did not rise above 5% at any point during that year. miss a relatively large proportion of incident (new) cases The majority of all moderately (69%) and severely (71%) of wasting occurring over time and, depending on the wasted children live in Asia (4). Just over one quarter timing of the survey on which they are based, seasonal of all moderately (28%) and severely (28%) wasted peaks may also be missed. This means that the current children live in Africa. The majority of wasted children global estimates probably underestimate the actual live outside of the humanitarian context, which is more annual burden of wasting (5). commonly associated with high levels of wasting and is where treatment programmes have traditionally The World Health Assembly wasting target (2) has focused. It is estimated that, globally, less than 15% two aspects – reducing and then maintaining levels of of wasted children are currently being reached by childhood wasting to below 5% – both of which are treatment services (see Table 1), and in some countries major challenges. Currently, some (highly populated) this percentage is considerably lower. These statistics countries report a prevalence of wasting of more than are of serious global concern, given the well-established 10% throughout the year, such as Nigeria (10%), Pakistan link between wasting and mortality. (15%) and India (20%). These levels are likely to rise during the lean seasons, as rates of wasting tend to “surge” Suboptimum growth indicative of wasting has been seasonally during the year (6, 7). Globally, wasting accounts shown to increase the risk of death in childhood from for 4.7% of all deaths of children aged under 5 years (8). infectious diseases such as diarrhoea, pneumonia and Severely wasted children are, on average, 11 times more measles (12). It is not yet well understood how much likely to die than their healthy counterparts (8). The current wasting contributes to conditions such as stunting, global levels of severe wasting are responsible for up to low birth weight and anaemia. Evidence does suggest, 2 million deaths annually (9). Furthermore, even higher however, that episodes of wasting negatively affect linear mortality has been reported when children are both growth and, therefore, undermine child growth and wasted and stunted (with low height-for-age) (8). development (5). At current trends, wasting rates of 7.8% will require Wasting and stunting share direct and underlying a near 40% reduction in order to achieve the target of causal factors and preventive services tackling these 5% by 2025 worldwide, and further investment and causes are likely to impact both conditions. Associations action are needed in order to reach the target. Of the between highly variable weight-for-height (a history 118 countries that reported the prevalence of wasting of episodes of wasting) and lower linear growth have in 2013, only 49 (42%) reported a national average been found (13). There must be a clear recognition that prevalence of less than 5%. This leaves 69 countries wasting confers double the risk of mortality associated TABLE 1. ESTIMATED GLOBAL NUMBERS AND PERCENTAGE OF CHILDREN AGED UNDER 5 YEARS WITH SEVERE AND MODERATE WASTING TREATED IN 2012 (4, 10, 11)a Severe wasting Moderate wasting Estimated number of children at any given time (4) 17 million 34 million Number of children reached with treatment services 2.6 million 4.6 million in 2012 Percentage of case-load reachedb <15% <13.5% a It should be noted that accurate reporting was identified as a weakness in both the severe and moderate wasting mapping exercises. b A challenge in the interpretation of these estimates of both the wasting burden and the reach of services is that they use prevalence measures (e.g. a measure of how widespread the problem is at one point in time), rather than incidence (a measure of cases occurring during the year). Wasting is a relatively short-term condition compared to stunting and, as described above, is also highly affected by seasonality. Using prevalence to measure the burden of wasting therefore risks underestimating the number of children affected and, in turn, overestimating the percentage of the yearly case-load being reached. Surveys of coverage (e.g. the percentage of those found to be wasted that are reached by treatment services) are required to accurately estimate how many wasted children are being reached, yet few countries have carried out national coverage assessments to date. 2 with stunting, and being both stunted and wasted confers an even higher risk. • rapidly develop evidence for effective prevention strategies to reduce the burden of wasting, which The lack of recognition of, and lack of emphasis on, can then be translated into policy actions; increased mortality risks means policy-makers may also not be aware of how important it is to tackle wasting as a priority. The following are actions that policy-makers • encourage and commission research to better should consider prioritizing, in order to reduce and understand the links between wasting and stunting, maintain the rate of wasting to 5% or less: to ensure maximum leverage is realized from the current investments in nutrition programming; • improve the identification, measurement and understanding of severe acute malnutrition and • encourage the increase of long-term funding for the scale up coverage of services for the identification prevention and treatment of acute malnutrition; and treatment of severe acute malnutrition; • improve coordination between key government • develop improved methods and linkages for ministries, to link treatment strategies for acute identification and treatment of severe acute malnutrition to prevention strategies to address malnutrition, both within the health sector and both acute malnutrition (wasting) and stunting cross-sectorally; throughout the life-course. Gates/Prashant Panjiar 3 WHAT CAUSES WASTING? in causing rapid weight loss (14). Another suggested risk factor for wasting in childhood is having low birth Children become wasted when they lose weight rapidly, weight or being small for gestational age. This risk usually as a direct result of a combination of infection and factor may, therefore, be of particular importance in diets that do not cover nutritional needs.1 regions that have a high prevalence of small babies, for
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