Highlight This Month: Early Identification of Cases
The success of Community-Based Therapeutic Care relies heavily on strong outreach and community awareness of malnutrition. Finding cases early before they become severe is critical. The MUAC cut-off between moderate and severe acute malnutrition in children under 5 years is 11.5 cm. Finding cases when they are still moderate prevents them from becoming severely malnourished, and of those children already severely malnourished, the sooner they are identified in the community, the greater the chances they survive.
With a network of 30 outreach workers per district, the programme has been incredibly successful at active case-finding and early identification. The average MUAC at admission for SAM cases is 10.8cm with 79% of cases being identified before they drop below 10.5cm. However, any case found too late is one case too many.
To better understand reasons for late admission, SAACID has been collecting data on all children admitted with MUAC <10cm since September. Not surprising, the findings have shown that 72% of the cases are from internally displaced families, and that 48% only knew of the CTC centre in their district for a week or less.