Plumpy'nut!

Sometimes, there is some good news.

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."

Read more in the New York Times.