How can I help?
You can help ensure we have access to the ongoing support and resources necessary to respond rapidly to all the people who need us. Please support Médecins Sans Frontières today and help us continue to offer emergency medical assistance in all of the resource-poor contexts in which we work.
Tell your friends how important it is for Médecins Sans Frontières to be able to respond rapidly to young children suffering malnutrition.
Share this page with your friends on your Facebook wall, tweet this page to your followers on Twitter, or email this page to a friend, and help us reach more people in need.
Make your own MUAC band
Print and cut-out a life-size Mid-Upper-Arm Circumference (MUAC) band to see for yourself how tiny a severely malnourished child's arms can be.We use the MUAC band to identify the level to which a child under five years of age is malnourished before proceeding with a treatment plan.
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One patient's story
From barely alive, to playing with other children, in three weeks.
A Médecins Sans Frontières therapeutic treatment centre for malnutrition in Marere, Somalia. © MSF
"Recently a mother and her husband brought us a two-year-old boy called Asad*. The family were farmers and all their animals had died. They told me the child had diarrhoea and couldn't eat. He was nothing more than bones and skin. He was so weak you could barely tell he was breathing.
We put the child in our intensive care unit until finally he opened his eyes. Then we fed him specialised milk through a feeding tube. After 24 hours he started moving his limbs. It was at that moment that his mother's face suddenly lit up – you could see that she had hope again.
After one week Asad didn't need to be fed through a tube any longer. He could drink milk on his own, and he could say "mum", and smile back if you called his name. Within 10 days his weight had increased significantly.
After three weeks in our hospital, Asad was playing around with the other children. His parents were beyond happiness – they didn't stop thanking Médecins Sans Frontières until they'd left the hospital."
* Name changed to protect patient privacy.