Until recently, when a severely malnourished person showed up at one of the international clinics run by Boston-based Partners in Health, they were given packets of food called RUTF, which stands for Ready to Use Therapeutic Food.
“Mothers can give this to even very severely malnourished children in their homes, and they don’t have to be hospitalized, which saves lives, it saves money, and it’s much less complicated for families,” said Dr. Joia Mukherjee, the international humanitarian organization’s senior clinical and academic advisor.
But because of the Trump administration’s cuts to international humanitarian assistance through the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, Mukherjee says they no longer have those meals available in places such as Malawi, an African country with high rates of malnutrition.
“RUTF had been funded in large part by UNICEF. UNICEF has less funding because of the U.S. cuts,” she said. “And so what we heard recently from Malawi is we have a drop in malnutrition treatment because nurses have stopped screening children for malnutrition because they have no RUTF in the cupboard.”
Mukherjee remembers one mother she met in Malawi who walked with her malnourished child to a clinic to get a supply of that food for the next month.
“And they said, ‘We don’t have any.’ and that child died,” Mukherjee said. “So it’s a profound impact that we’re seeing.”
It’s been roughly a year since the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance through USAID. Research published in the journal The Lancet calculated that by 2030, 14 million people would likely die as a result of the funding cuts, including four and a half million children.
Partners in Health is mostly funded by private donations, so it’s not directly reliant on USAID funding to staff their programs, Mukherjee explained. But she said the federal cuts have decimated basic supplies, including tests for malaria that were previously available to health clinics in higher risk areas.
“So what you see, then, is children coming into the hospital with much more severe malaria, because if you catch it early, the children are OK because you can treat it,” Mukherjee said. “But because there were no tests at the peripheral sites, then these children were coming in far sicker or sometimes in a coma to the central hospital.”
Mukherjee described a visit to a Partners in Health clinic in Sierra Leone in the fall.
“I saw one child who became blind from very severe malaria,” she said. “And the child could have been treated easily, with no disability at all, had they been treated earlier. But because there were no malaria tests, the peripheral center could not initiate treatment.”
Mukherjee acknowledged there’s a lot going on in the world to which the U.S. needs to devote resources, including the war with Iran. But she pointed out that during the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. managed to significantly step up global health funding even during the Iraq War.
She hasn’t given up hope the Trump administration’s cuts will be reversed.
“We think it is necessary and we have to fight for it,” Mukherjee said. “So we want people to put pressure on their Congresspeople, their senators, to say, ‘we care about this issue.’ This is a small percentage of the American budget, a very small percentage. It does only good. There is no downside. And so we really want people to raise their voices and care about this.”
