Acute malnutrition surveillance with anthropometry: what do we need to know?
The surveillance of acute malnutrition in children is key for understanding crisis situations, guiding and prioritizing actions, and allocating resources. This brief presents key findings from a collaborative report by the European Commission Joint Research Centre and UNICEF that analyzed 682,283 child observations from 27 countries to explore the use of these indicators in estimating acute malnutrition.
Results show that WFH and MUAC measurements reveal different aspects of acute malnutrition and are complementary indicators that are not interchangeable. Factors like sex, age and stunting status influence how children are diagnosed as acutely malnourished using these indicators. Depending on the indicator used, certain groups, such as girls or boys, older or younger children, may be identified as more vulnerable to AM.
To accurately interperet AM estimates, it is crucial to specifiy the indicator used and dissagregate results by sex, age (under and over 2 years) and stunting status.Using the WHO population based prevalence thresholds to interpret the severity of acute malnutrition when using prevalence derived from MUAC indicators is likely to result in incorrect severity classifications. We recommend to use the method proposed by the IPC Acute Malnutrition tool to interpret GAM when measured by MUAC.
VERSTRAETEN Roosmarijn;
CUSTODIO Estefania;
2024-01-31
European Commission
JRC136263
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