Dr. Mark Manary’s Project Peanut Butter saves thousands of malnourished children in sub-Saharan Africa  ST. LOUIS, November 8, 2007 – As a pediatric emergency medicine physician, Dr. Mark Manary is trained to save young lives. But it is his innovative use of peanut butter that saved the lives of more than 20,000 children in Malawi, Africa over the last five years.
Manary, a physician at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine, founded Project Peanut Butter, a program that manufactures and distributes a peanut-based therapeutic food to rescue severely malnourished children in Malawi. Manary was honored today with a $50,000 cash grant at the 10th Annual World of Children (WOC) Awards Ceremony at UNICEF House in New York City. Manary took the top award among the eight honorees, including two other finalists, an Argentine plastic surgeon that repairs cleft lips and palates for underprivileged children, and a physician in India working to improve health, nutrition and social services for poor children.
Project Peanut Butter is the result of Manary’s experience fighting starvation in developing countries for more than two decades. “Originally, we were facing dismal recovery rates of 25-40 percent for children we were serving in Malawi,” said Manary. Children were previously given a milk-based, low-energy food in a traditionally overcrowded hospital setting that subjected them to further risk of infection, and that required a family member to remain with them for the duration of their stay. Dr. Manary conceived and implemented a new approach; feed the children a mixture of peanut butter, milk powder, vitamins and minerals, cooking oil and sugar, which could be produced locally, eaten without preparation, and stored for months, unrefrigerated, without spoiling. He provided families a six-week supply to be administered seven times per day, and sent them back to their villages to recover at home. Treatment success rates jumped to 90%.
Malawi, where 10 million of the country’s 11 million inhabitants are village-dwelling subsistence farmers, suffers from a lack of local infrastructure. There are few roads, poor irrigation and very little reliable electricity. Manary wanted to build an infrastructure of care that local residents could sustain. “We rely on local health workers to deliver treatment, many of whom have not fully completed secondary school,” said Manary. “These workers are trained to implement the protocol in villages where families most need the services, independent of highly-trained, highly-educated medical staff.” The peanut butter food is manufactured locally in a factory by ten Malawi workers and their supervisors.
“Mark Manary’s extraordinary efforts have saved the lives of thousands of children in Africa,” said Harry Leibowitz, Ph.D., Founder and Chairman of World of Children. “His innovative strategies are models for developing countries to follow in eradicating child malnutrition and related preventable diseases.”
Over the last five years, the project has directly helped an estimated 20,000 children in Malawi, and indirectly assisted tens of thousands of others served by organizations that purchase Dr. Manary’s RUTF for the cost of ingredients, transporting it to additional sub-Saharan African countries. Manary’s goal was to embed Project Peanut Butter’s treatment protocols within the health care and social service systems in Malawi. He designed curriculum for the University of Malawi’s College of Malnutrition and influenced the Malawi Ministry of Health to include RUTF in the national protocol. Recently, the World Health Organization named RUTF as the preferred method by which to treat severely malnourished children.
“Many malnourished children in Malawi are thought not to be worth bothering with or are erroneously labeled as HIV-positive,” said Manary. “We work to turn these perceptions around and do whatever it takes to treat these children before disability and death sets in.”
Project Peanut Butter is one of Dr. Manary’s five international nutrition projects, and he spends nearly half the year working on Project Peanut Butter in Malawi. His next visit is scheduled for January 2008, and coincides with the development of new sites in Malawi, and the establishment of a factory in Sierra Leone, a country in which 28% of children die before reaching the age of five, often from malnutrition.
# # #
About World of Children (WOC)
World of Children provides cash grants to organizations around the world that make extraordinary contributions to improving the lives of children. Since 1998, World of Children has awarded more than $2 million in cash grants to 62 child advocates working in more than 35 countries, impacting millions of children worldwide. Muhammad Ali, three-time Heavyweight World Champion and humanitarian, is the Honorary Chair of World of Children. For more information about World of Children, visit worldofchildren.org. |