Settling in...

With the first week almost behind me, I am getting adjusted to life in Malawi. I have had a lot of time to think really carefully about my study that begins this Friday. I thought that since there hasn't been any crazy stories yet to tell, that I would take the time to tell everyone a little about what I am doing here.

Malnutrition in Malawi accounts for 70% of the stunting (not growing enough) in children. Project Peanut Butter has developed a way to treat severe malnutrition using "chiponde" or Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF). This food is like peanut butter, and has 5 ingredients: peanuts, powdered milk, oil, sugar and vitamins. It has incredible recovery rates, especially compared to traditional treatments (flour blends to make porridge with).

The study that I am doing is looking to see if it is possible to switch the powdered milk ingredient with soy. Why? Powdered milk is an extremely expensive commodity and is not produced locally in Malawi. Project Peanut Butter must import the powdered milk from places like South Africa, making milk cost 4x the price of any other ingredient. Soy, on the other hand, is locally grown and we can grind roasted soy beans into a flour that acts just like the milk. What we hope to find is that children recover equally well on a soy/peanut blend as they do on a milk/peanut blend. Since the corn/soy blended flour remains the standard of care for the treatment of malnutrition, we will include this as the third food group and control.

On Friday, we will go to a village called Mwanza to screen children to be included in the study. Children must meet 3 important criteria: 1. They must be aged 1 year to 5 years old; 2. Their mother must not have walked more than 1 hour to get to the clinic; 3. The child is moderately malnourished (versus severely malnourished. These differ by how far the child is from ideal body weight). We are looking to have 1200 children in the study.

So, that is it, in a nut shell. I'm pretty excited, and if this study is successful, this could completely change the standard treatment for malnourishment in rural settings. I am very grateful to Dr. Manary and Fulbright for letting me come do this work!

Anyway, that's all for now. I'll definitely post again after Mwanza on Friday.

-DKM