Doctors Without Borders: Treating Global Childhood Malnutrition

Every year, malnutrition and common infectious diseases claim the lives of millions of children, taking an enormous toll on the surviving children and their families.

Globally, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has continued to expand its nutritional activities to try to keep up with worsening malnutrition in so many places. In 2023, MSF again cared for a record number of malnourished children, admitting 161,000 young, malnourished children to inpatient feeding centers who were so sick that they needed 24-hour care (an increase of 27percent from 2022) and treating 499,500 children with moderate or severe malnutrition as outpatients (an increase of 14 percent).

In 2024, MSF teams continue to witness and respond to multiple humanitarian crises in which children are suffering immensely. High prices, protracted conflicts, refugee crises, and climate change are deeply affecting people’s ability to feed their children and access medical care. In response, MSF is scaling up nutrition programs to treat large numbers of children.

Please support our malnutrition programs with a gift to MSF today!

Photo Credit: Chad 2024 © Dan Kitwood