"Today, more than half of the deaths of children under the age of five are due to malnutrition- 6 million per year, 12 children every minute" (Doctors Without Borders Promotional material).
Malnutrition affects about 200 million children across the world, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where access to nutritious food is close to impossible. When MSF enters a village, devastated by famine, the volunteers take a MUAC- mid-upper-arm circumference- test using labeled wrist bands, seen in the picture above.
When famine strikes, children are the first to suffer from malnutrition. MSF's focus on triage- treat those with the worst bodily state first- calls for a quick way to determine who should be treated first. Volunteers can use the MUAC wrist bands to quickly assess the order in which patients should be attended to.
I was given a MUAC wrist band in my intern packet one the first day and I thought it was fake, because I couldn't imagine a child's forearm being that small. Seeing this was the first time that I could begin to relate to the work that MSF does, and what the volunteers witness everyday by the thousands. There is a difference between reading about suffering and seeing it first hand, and not until you experience it does it really become true to you, even though you might have thought it was before. It affects you in a life altering way.
I'm going to bring back these tests and display them at my presentation so that everyone can experience what I did when I first saw the tests!
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