Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM):
- It is the most extreme and visible form of undernutrition.
- Children suffering from Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) have:
- very low weight-for-height (below-3z scores of the WHO median growth standard),
- visible wasting,
- nutritional oedema or mid-upper arm circumference of less than 115 millimetres (in children 6–59 months).
Recent Guidelines:
- Anganwadi workers and auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs) have a role to identify severely wasted children, segregating those with oedema or medical complications and sending them to the nearest health facility or nutrition rehabilitation centres.
- The remaining children are enrolled into “community-based management”, which includes provision of nutrition, continuous monitoring of growth as well as imparting of nutrition and health education.
- SAM children must be fed freshly cooked food prepared from locally available cereals, pulses and vegetables, and distributed by anganwadi centres.
- Government has also revised the method to be used to measure wasting and advised calculating weight based on the height of children instead of the mid-upper arm circumference.
The government had, till now, only put in place guidelines for the hospitalisation of severely wasted children who develop medical complications. Those norms were made public in 2011.
