bookofjoe

Plumpy'nut — Episode II: The End of Starvation?

Michael Wines wrote an article which appeared on August 8 in the New York Times about how Plumpy'nut, a ready–to–eat peanut–based paste in foil packages (above), is showing great promise in alleviating starvation among children in Niger, in the midst of yet another in a series of seemingly endlessly recurrent hunger crises.

The breakthrough lies in the fact that instead of having to hospitalize malnourished people, distributing Plumpy'nut is cheaper, the product has a two–year–shelf life, and it can be given to mothers to give their children, who seem to accept it without any problem.

Doctors are thus removed from the loop, enabling far more widespread distribution.

Plumpy'nut comes in a silvery foil package "the size of two grasping baby–size hands" and contains 500 calories of fortified peanut butter, along with milk, vitamins and minerals.

Mothers are told to give each baby two packets of Plumpy'nut each day; the children immediately begin to gain weight, on average 1-2 pounds a week.

Parents are the product's biggest fans.

Idrissa, a 24–year–old mother of a 2–year–old, told Wines, "As soon as I got him home, he started eating it — every day, aggressively. And after three days, I could see a big difference. The change was abrupt."

The usual four week course of treatment costs about $20.

What I don't understand is why this product is not available in unlimited quantities for free to anyone on Earth who wants it.

If hunger were eliminated I daresay much war would somehow disappear as well.

Flooding the zone, as it were, with unlimited nutrition would be cheap at 100 times the price.

Here's the article.

Hope for Hungry Children, Arriving in a Foil Packet

In the crowd of riotously dressed mothers clasping wailing, naked infants at a Doctors Without Borders feeding center just west of here, Taorey Asama, at 27 months, stands out for a heart-rending reason: she looks like a normal baby.

Many of the others have the skeletal frames and baggy skin of children with severe malnutrition.

The good news is that a month ago, so did Taorey.

"When she came here, she was all small and curled up," said her mother, Henda, 30.

"It's Plumpy'nut that's made her like this. She's immense!"

Never heard of Plumpy'nut?

Come to Maradi, a bustling crossroads where the number of malnourished children exceeds even the flocks of motor scooters flitting down its dirt streets.

At this epicenter of Niger's latest hunger crisis, Plumpy'nut is saving lives, perhaps including Taorey's.

Plumpy'nut, which comes in a silvery foil package the size of two grasping baby-size hands, is 500 calories of fortified peanut butter, a beige paste about as thick as mashed potatoes and stuffed with milk, vitamins and minerals.

But that is akin to calling a 1945 Mouton Rothschild fortified grape juice.

Since the packets came into the hands of relief organizations during the Darfur crisis in Sudan, they have been revolutionizing emergency care for severely malnourished children who are old enough to take solid food, by taking care out of crowded field hospitals and straight into mothers' homes.

The prescription given to mothers here is simple: give one baby two packets of Plumpy'nut each day.

Watch him wolf them down.

Wait for him to grow.

Which he will, almost immediately: badly malnourished babies can gain one to two pounds a week eating Plumpy'nut.

"This product, it's beyond opinion - it's documented, it's scientific fact," Dr. Milton Tectonidis, a Paris-based nutrition specialist for Doctors Without Borders, said in an interview here.

"We've seen it working. With this one product, we can treat three-quarters of children on an outpatient basis. Before, we had to hospitalize them all and give them fortified milk."

Traditional malnutrition therapy hospitalizes the tots, nursing them to health with steady infusions of vitamin-laced milk.

Then they are sent home with powdered milk formula to complete their recovery.

It works well, but milk is costly, must be mixed from water and is prone to spoiling.

And when mothers prepare the formula with the dirty water all too common in impoverished villages, babies get sick.

In comparison, Plumpy'nut - the name melds the words "plump" and "peanut" - costs less than the milk formula, has a two-year shelf life and need not be mixed with anything.

Its sealed packaging and thick consistency make it a poor home for disease-causing germs that thrive in milk.

Perhaps most revolutionary, however, is that mothers, not doctors, can give it to their toddlers.

That not only reduces costs, but also frees the doctors to treat the sickest children, who often suffer not just from malnutrition, but also from diseases like malaria or dysentery.

The usual course of treatment is four weeks of Plumpy'nut, costing about $20, along with grain-based food like Unimix, a vitamin-packed flour that can be made into the porridge many Africans eat.

But some children return to health in as little as two weeks.

The product is the brainchild of a French scientist, André Briend, who had labored in vain for years to concoct a ready-to-eat nutrition supplement, until serendipity - a bottle of the popular Nutella breakfast spread on his kitchen table - led him to try a paste instead using candy bars and other kinds of food.

Later, Nutriset, a French company that specializes in making food supplements for relief work, began packaging the formula under the name Plumpy'nut.

For three months, Doctors Without Borders has been handing out week-long supplies of Plumpy'nut, 14 foil packets in a black plastic grocery sack, at its five outpatient feeding centers in Maradi and 21 centers elsewhere in Niger.

Not everyone gets it: newcomer babies are weighed and measured, and only those whose weight is dramatically below normal for their height qualify.

Those who are too ill for outpatient care go to a nearby field hospital.

About 700 babies are being treated in Maradi, and about 130 more arrive for screening each day, of which perhaps 80 are accepted and given an ankle bracelet - their ticket, so to speak, good for a weekly trip to the center for more foil packs, bags of grain and cooking oil.

Across the area of hunger in Niger, about 5,000 children spread across 32 feeding centers are being given the packets.

Theodore Bitangi, a 33-year-old nurse who oversees the Maradi feeding centers, says that the program is growing almost as rapidly as its patients.

"When they come in, the state they're in, they look like embryos. They're so small sometimes," he said.

"And after taking Plumpy'nut, they look like real babies."

Mothers who have been feeding the paste to their babies would hardly disagree.

"As soon as I got him home, he started eating it - every day, aggressively," Idrissa, 24, who has no last name, said of her 2-year-old son.

"And after three days, I could see a big difference. The change was abrupt."

Her son, who refused to open his eyes before starting the Plumpy'nut regimen one week ago, has added fat under his sagging skin and, when his packet is finished, cries for another.

"I don't know how to express it," Idrissa said. "I'm so happy."

Raham, 45, who has no last name, walks an hour each way to the clinic from her village, Madata, to pick up a weekly bag of Plumpy'nut for her year-old son, Safia Ibrahim.

"It's no problem to walk that far," she said, "because it's for the health of my baby. And there's nothing to eat in our village."

One of the virtues of Plumpy'nut is that it can be made almost anywhere with local materials and a slurry of vitamins and minerals prepared by Nutriset.

Versions of the same product are being manufactured in Malawi and in Niger's capital, Niamey, and Nutriset has welcomed the notion of local partners - from charities to women's groups - who might make Plumpy'nut under license or even as franchisees.

Which raises a question: if Plumpy'nut is good enough to give malnourished children in food emergencies, why not give it to the countless thousands of children in Niger who are hungry when the world's attention is directed elsewhere?

The United Nations reports that 150,000 children under age 5 in Niger are severely malnourished, and another 650,000 moderately malnourished - all together, about one in five.

Malnutrition is a factor in 60 percent of deaths of children younger than 5 - and in Niger, more than a quarter of all children never reach their fifth birthday.

Fourteen packets a week times 150,000 children times 4 weeks is a lot of Plumpy'nut.

But then, says Dr. Tectonidis, it is not the mathematics, or even the nutrition science, that is the hard part.

It is keeping the world's eyes focused on solving Niger's everyday hunger problem once the television coverage of this crisis has ended.

"We know what's needed in terms of malnutrition," he said.

"It's just the will that's lacking."

Clear Car Floor Mat Protectors

You keep all your furniture under plastic, and the plastic sheets over your rugs and carpets prevent them from being damaged or stained.

You are a very careful person.

So you would be remiss not to order, posthaste, a set of these clear plastic car floor mat protectors to keep you car's floors impeccable.

From the website:

Many of us own luxury mats to add a touch of class to our vehicles.

But, for daily use, we'd like to protect them from grit, mud, snow and spills.

Clear Mat Protectors are an ideal solution.

Their honeycomb pattern keeps grunge from sliding over the sides.

With 4,200 patterns, there's a set to fit your car, truck, van or SUV perfectly.

Going out on the town?

Take 30 seconds to remove the clear mats, for full enjoyment of the pristine carpeting or mats beneath.

A 2–piece front mat set costs $44.95 here.

I must say that picturing some gussied–up girl in her great new Azzedine Alaïa dress

taking the time and trouble to remove the plastic protectors from her floor mats before heading downtown just cracks me up.

Fresh Grated Salt?

Saltstones (above), also known as Himalayan crystal salt, can be grated at the table like Parmigiano.

Over the past year you may have noticed various places selling lamps made from giant saltstones.

From the website:

These large crystals of Original Himalayan Crystal Salt look like uncut diamonds and come in various shades from pink to dark rose to absolutely colorless and transparent.

These holistic, natural crystals of pure salt were subject to tremendous pressure when the Himalayan Mountains were formed.

Locked within the crystals are the same 84 minerals found in the blood, readily and easily absorbed and metabolized by your body.

The crystal stones come packaged in 100% cotton bags.

$29.50 for 2.2 lbs. (1 kg) here. (Click on Original Himalayan Crystal Salt™, then scroll down to the fifth item. [Lamps follow].)

Morphing Shoe Turns Into a Flip–Flop!

Ha.

You thought you'd ended up on the Enquirer website, didn't you?

Admit it — it's cool.

With sensational headlines like that you know it's only a matter of time until I become a totally whacked–out source of nothing but stuff like this.

But for now I'm able to keep it pretty much under control, with only an occasional leak. But enough — on to the subject at hand.

Teva, which makes excellent shoes, has created a woman's walking shoe that, well, looks just like a dorky woman's walking shoe, let's face it.

But no one but you will know what you're packing underneath your bland exterior.

Because when the moment is right you will suddenly remove your shoes, take out the midsoles, and convert them into supremely comfortable flip–flops for chillin' and suchlike.

The shoe itself is made of waterproof leather and comes in wheat (above) or black.

Women's whole sizes 6–11.

$89 here.

Money for nothing — BedBumpers™

It's time once again for a bookofjoe brainstorm: a new invention, just conceived by moi, that you can patent, develop, and make a nice chunk of change from.

Me, I've done all the heavy lifting: all you have to do is take your money to the bank.

More or less.

Here's today's lightning bolt: BedBumpers™.

I just gashed my shin on a metal bedframe for probably the thousandth time in my life, this time while making the guest room bed.

Why did I need to make the guest room bed, you might ask?

That's for me to know and .... But I digress.

How is it that ever since I was a boy — and I suspect even before that, back in the 19th century — bed frames have had hard, unforgiving, sharp edges and corners that can strip your shin right down to the bone?

Because the solution is so obvious: simply cover the potentially damaging hard surfaces with something softer.

But the fact no one's done it means you can leave your day job and live the life you've always dreamed of.

Simply fill out a patent application and send it in; then design a prototype and sell it to some mattress maker for a royalty on every set of BedBumpers™ sold.

You'll be rich in no time flat.

I've even thrown in a great product name at no extra charge: you're really not gonna get a better deal during what remains of the day.

Hey — that would make a great title for a book, don't you think?

Alligator Lamp

Sometimes I just like the way something looks.

I admit it: Oscar Wilde's penetrating epigram, "Only the shallow judge by more than appearances," long ago burrowed deep into my reptilian brain.

Which is why, perhaps, this Alligator Lamp has crawled out onto your computer screen.

"Swiveling, pivoting Alligator Lamp lets you read in dark places and work in tight spaces — hands free!"

Tell us more.

From the website:

Clip an Alligator Lamp to your cap and you can read in pitch darkness.

Just flip up the head to activate twin unbreakable LEDs that protrude from raised pods.

Aim at any angle through 180° to project bright light right where it's needed.

Heavy–duty clip keeps your hands free for exacting close–up work and emergency repairs.

Clips to anything up to 1/2" thick.

Two included lithium coin cell batteries give over 100 hours of light.

Comes in Goldenrod, Khaki, Moss or Burnt Orange.

$19.95 here. (Cap not included.)

Now don't go getting your knickers in a twist thinking this is the long–sought perfect bedtime reading lamp: 2 LEDs is just not enough to do the job.

But I'm glad you're still hopeful; me too.

If we work together eventually we'll find it.

That's a promise — or I will cheerfully refund every penny you've spent here.

With interest.

More or less.

Depending.

ePodunk.com

What a great domain name.

And a wonderfully useful website as well.

All manner of information and features including lots of links to find out more about anyplace you're curious about.

Excellent for checking out the little town you grew up in to see what other people have to say about it.

How is it that this site is unknown?

It's not right and I'm doing my darndest to change that.

Battery–Free Perpetual Flashlight

What's this?

They've mastered cold fusion and used it to power a... flashlight?

No — not quite.

But be patient.

In the meantime there's this quite arresting looking "shake–'n–bake" flashlight for your inspection.

From the website:

This remarkable EverLife Flashlight never needs batteries or bulbs so it's maintenance-free.

It uses your energy and electromagnetism to produce a bright blue/white light using super-efficient LED technology.

Just shake the light for about 30 seconds and the EverLife Flashlight provides up to 3 minutes of light.

Shake it for 10-15 seconds every 2 or 3 minutes for an unlimited supply of light.

Perfect for emergency kits — you can leave it in your car, home, boat or RV for months at a time and it still gives you light when you need it.

The bright LED will last for thousands of hours and may never need replacing.

Features a waterproof, floating plastic body.

LED can be seen a mile away.

How does it work?

When the flashlight is shaken back and forth a strong magnet passes repeatedly through the visible copper wire coil and charges the capacitor.

Where were you when they covered electromagnetism during high school physics?

Passing notes?

IM'ing your friends?

Whatever.

They've sweetened the deal.

You get not one but two flashlights: the regular 8"–long version and a mini iteration, 5"–long and perfect for your pocketbook or bag.

$19.98 here (batteries not included).

Shake it up.