Global nutrition targets 2025: wasting policy brief

Overview

The global target for 2025 will be achieved if high burden countries take stock of their current prevalence, projected population growth, underlying causes of wasting and the resources available to address them; set target annual reduction rates to guide intervention efforts; mobilize necessary resources and develop and implement systematic plans for the reduction of wasting. In addition, all countries need to examine inequalities among populations and identify priority actions for particular vulnerable or marginalized groups, where there are clusters of large numbers of wasting children. Such an equity-inspired approach is both an ethical imperative and a judicious investment strategy.

Wasting is a major health problem and, owing to its associated risks for morbidity, requires urgent attention from policy-makers and programme implementers alike. Addressing wasting is of critical importance because of the heightened risk of disease and death for children who lose too much of their body weight. It will be difficult to continue improving rates of child survival without improvements in the proportion of wasted children receiving timely and appropriate life-saving treatment, alongside reductions in the number of children becoming wasted in the first place (prevention).