Before the earthquake hit, 250,000 children in Haiti were malnourished. From birth to two years, malnourished children are likely to be impaired cognitively and physically forever.
Since 2008, 9,000 children have recovered their strength by taking a “peanut butter medicine,” developed by Meds and Food for Kids, a St. Louis-based nonprofit started by a Washington University pediatric professor.
The group has established a Haitian-run “social-benefit enterprise” to produce nutrient-rich foods, including Medika Mamba, the butter that rebuilds a child’s strength in six to eight weeks.
Since the earthquake, the enterprise has tried to ramp up production to 70,000 pounds of the medicine a week, which treats 300 children.
“We are protecting children’s brains,” said Tom Stehl, coordinator of operations for Meds and Food for Kids. “Children in Haiti are in this pit. Medika Mamba is a ladder that enables them to walk a path of normalcy.”
Two days before the Jan. 12 earthquake killed more than 200,000 people, Lora Iannotti, Ph.D., nutrition and public health expert from the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, traveled to Port-au-Prince and Leogane, Haiti, to collaborate with Meds and Food for Kids on research regarding undernutrition and disease prevention in young children.
She had just visited a nursing school, and she was sitting outside at a restaurant. Then the earthquake hit.
She and her two colleagues didn’t realize the magnitude of the quake until they started working with Doctors Without Borders hours later. She said the global nonprofit was prepared, and she and her colleagues worked through the night tending to people.
However, the next morning when the sleepless Iannotti traveled to Leogane, a town almost 90 percent destroyed, the local doctors had extremely limited resources. For severe injuries, the staff only had Tylenol to administer for pain.
When she finally slept in an open field, Iannotti remembers hearing Haitian families singing and talking about everyday issues. They were saying that the schools would be closed, and Mardi Gras would be cancelled.
“It was comforting to hear them,” she said. “And feeling the tremors from the aftershock all night was powerful.”
Iannotti, who has been working in Haiti since 1990, said people who want to help or contribute money should focus on the groups that have experience working in the country.
Meds and Food for Kids was officially started in 2004 by Patricia Wolffe, professor of pediatrics as Washington University and private pediatrician. Wolffe had been going to Haiti as a medical volunteer for 20 years.
In 2000, she went to the Republic of Malawi in Africa with her colleague Mark Manary, also a pediatrician and a professor of pediatrics at the Washington University School of Medicine. He was pioneering Ready-to-Use Therapeutic foods, using a combination of peanuts, sugar, vegetable oil, milk powder and a vitamin/nutrients mixture. Manary’s approach was to produce the food in country and not import it from the United States.
Over her years volunteering in Haiti, Wolffe watched children die from causes mostly rooted in malnutrition. So she decided to follow her colleague’s model in Haiti. She got the recipe from Manary and started producing the product for just one clinic at first. Now it’s the gold standard for treating children with malnutrition throughout the country, Stehl said.
Haiti’s Ministry of Health, World Health Organization and UNICEF endorse Medika Mamba.
“You have to take a step back and ask: ‘What it is replacing?’ It replaces going to the hospital and a plate of rice with no nutrients,” Stehl said.
The World Health Organization standard was to send malnourished children to the hospital. However, in the Nord department alone, there are 15,000 malnourished children and 100 hospital beds.
When a mother takes her child to a clinic with a Medika Mamba program, the nurse takes the child’s height and weight and enrolls the child into the program. First, these children are given anti-parasitic and antibiotic medicines.
“In many cases, if not all cases, the children have parasitic worms that are competing with the child for nutrients,” Stehl said. “We also give an antibiotic because we need to get rid of all infection before any therapy can be effective.”
Every two weeks, the mother returns for another two kilos of Medika Mamba.
Factory in Haiti
When Wolffe was first trying to decide where to manufacture the product, she knew it would be easier to produce in the United States.
“But at the end of the day, that doesn’t do anything to address the root problems of child malnutrition,” Stehl said. “She made the decision to not only be committed to helping Haiti’s malnourished children, but also economic stagnation.”
The factory employs 25 Haitians and three Americans. The model is a social-benefit enterprise, Stehl said. The goal is to make the production arm of Medika Mamba self-supporting through earned income. Groups like Catholic Relief Services and World Vision buy this product for their efforts.
The group isn’t quite there yet, because the cost of production in Haiti is much higher than it would be in the United States. For example, electricity is not available to everyone. The group uses a generator that runs on diesel fuel. The secret to obtaining their goal is to produce more, Stehl said.
“The way you can drive costs down is by scale,” he said. “We are in the growth phase and in process of scaling up production.”
For now, MFK is still dependent on grants and donations.
The only raw materials that MFK uses from Haiti are the peanuts. Haitians have grown peanuts for generations. Stehl said the group has been working with Haitian farmers to grow higher-quality peanuts.
Scientists with the University of Georgia and Oklahoma State University, who are some of the best minds in peanut production in the world, Stehl said, visit periodically to help Meds and Food for Kids connect to Haitian farmers.
The catastrophe is going to set the country back by a decade, he said, and Haiti needs continued support.
“When CNN sends Anderson Cooper home, Haiti is still going to be marred in this,” Stehl said. “We have to be vigilant about this.”