Every year, acute malnutrition is implicated in the preventable deaths of millions of children worldwide. At any given moment, more than 60 million young children in the world have signs of acute malnutrition - characterized by sudden weight loss or wasting - and are at serious risk of death unless they receive specialized care.

Nutritional emergencies are usually thought to be associated only with conflict and displacement, but acute malnutrition is highly prevalent in politically stable countries wracked by poverty. In these contexts, the insistence on trying to address long-term development issues has come at the expense of meeting immediate needs. Services to treat even the severest forms of acute malnutrition are generally unavailable outside large humanitarian emergencies.

Moreover, during such emergencies, the numbers of patients requiring treatment frequently overwhelms inpatient feeding centers. Recent strategies, though, to treat large numbers of malnourished children who have no other medical complications in their homes with relatively new ready-to-use therapeutic products (RUTF), like the milk and peanut-butter paste Plumpy'nut (Africa's miracle food: plumpy'nut, offer important new promise. The energy-dense, nutrient-rich products are ideal for rapid weight gain in malnourished children with poor appetites and small stomachs. The outpatient strategies allow for the treatment of large numbers of children.

In the past two years in the impoverished central African nation of Niger, this outpatient treatment that relies on RUTFs has allowed MSF to successfully treat more than 150,000 children for moderate and severe acute malnutrition. Such products and strategies can be adapted and implemented through national health services elsewhere, but are not. While continued efforts to address the underlying causes of malnutrition are critical, it is possible today to offer simple and effective curative treatment to tens of millions of children facing a high risk of death.