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UNU-FNP developing new growth standards for children

UNU Food and Nutrition Programme (UNU-FNP) is working with the World Health Organization (WHO) to develop new growth standards for infants and young children. 

New growth standards will provide a basis for improved advoacy on behalf of the world's children.

Backed by a a US$6.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the six-year project will provide better tools to asses child growth and a basis for improved advocacy on behalf of the world's children.

The new standards will allow more accurate estimates of malnutrition, enabling identification of children in the process of becoming undernourished or overweight, rather than delaying diagnosis after those states have been reached. They will also be linked to motor development assessments, underscoring the important message that normal physical growth, while an essential element of development, is  insufficient by itself.

Cutberto Garza

"Growth standards are the most commonly used tools for assessing the general well-being of individuals, groups of infants and children, and the communities in which they live, and for tracking progress in reaching a range of health and social equity goals," says Prof. Cutberto Garza, of the UNU and Cornell University's Division of Nutritional Sciences, which hosts the UNU-FNP coordination centre.

The grant supports a new approach to the development of growth standards. "The selection of children for the new standards included a prescription of health behaviours, such as breastfeeding norms, standard paediatric care and non-smoking requirements, that are linked to desirable health outcomes," says project coordinator Dr. Mercedes de Onis, of the WHO Department of Nutrition for Health and Development. "This makes the new standards fundamentally different from the traditional references which merely describe how children grow at a specific time and place." 

Dr. de Onis says the work is being undertaken because of the inadequacies of the present international reference, which fails to depict physiological growth. "Its weaknesses interfere with the appropriate management of children's health and do not support international health goals, for example regarding breastfeeding. Moreover, its reliance on a single country's data encourages acceptance of growth discrepancies as inevitable, rather than a consequence of inadequate investment in children."

These conclusions were evident from the project's first phase, which began 14 years ago with an evaluation of the current international growth reference, resulting in a plan for new standards. The second phase, which ended last December, focused on collection of growth and related data. The project follows the growth and development of some 8500 children in Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman, and the USA.

Ninety-nine countries now use the current international reference. The project's goal is that, by 2010, most of these countries will be using, or have initiated the transition to the new standards. This shift will be exploited to improve links between growth assessments and growth promotion activities, such as the Millennium Development Goals.

"WHO's international normative responsibilities, the UNU's role as the UN's academic arm, and both agencies' worldwide networks make them ideal partners to lead this international effort," says Dr. Catherine Le Galès-Camus, WHO Assistant-Director General, Non-communicable Diseases & Mental Health. "The new standards are important for WHO's work across the entire spectrum of nutritional health problems, from malnutrition to obesity."

 © 2004  United Nations University