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SCN Endorses the New WHO Growth Standards for Infants and Young Children
The Standing Committee on Nutrition of the United Nations System (SCN)
welcomes and endorses the long-awaited WHO Child Growth Standards, released on
April 27, 2006.
For the first time, the new WHO Child Growth Standards provide an effective
tool for detecting undernutrition, overweight and obesity in children in all
countries of the world, thus addressing the double burden of malnutrition that
is increasingly affecting populations on a global basis. The new growth
standards demonstrate that children born in different regions of the world, and
given an optimum start in life, have the potential to grow and develop within
the same range of height and weight for age. These growth standards are based on
a careful long-term study of infants and children from Africa, Asia, Europe,
Latin America, and North America. These children were fed according to accepted
international nutritional standards, and their mothers were adequately nourished
and avoided known adverse factors such as tobacco exposure.
Growth charts based on the new WHO Child Growth Standards will differ from
any existing growth charts in a number of innovative ways. For the first time
they will describe “how children should grow,” which is a prescriptive approach,
not just a descriptive one. These standards show that all children across all
regions can attain a similar standard of height and weight and development with
adequate feeding practices, good healthcare and a healthy environment. It is,
then, a more proactive way of measuring and evaluating child growth, setting out
normative conditions and evaluating children and populations against that
standard. As such, a key characteristic of the new standard is that it
establishes breastfeeding as the biological “norm” and the breastfed infant as
the standard for measuring healthy growth. Previous reference charts were based
on the growth of a mixture of breastfed and artificially-fed children.
Furthermore, the pooled sample from the six participating countries allows the
development of a truly international standard, in contrast to the previous
international reference based on children from a single country. The development
for the first time of standardized Body Mass Index (BMI) charts for infants to
five years of age is a major innovation in assessing healthy weight growth of
children. Additionally, the development of Windows of Achievement for six key
motor development milestones will provide a unique link between physical growth
and motor development.
The SCN is fully committed to supporting and promoting the adoption of the
new WHO Child Growth Standards globally. The growth standards establish
guidelines for the healthy growth and development of all infants and young
children in all countries. They also provide support for good general mother and
child health care practices such as immunization, sound nutrition (starting with
exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life), and adequate pre- and
post-natal care for mothers (including good nutrition and avoidance of tobacco).
The new Growth Standards provide further support for the promotion of
internationally recognized infant and young child feeding recommendations:
exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life, thereafter the
introduction of adequate complementary foods while breastfeeding is continued to
two years and beyond. The growth standards will be widely used as a tool in
public health, public nutrition, medicine and by governmental and health
organizations for monitoring the well-being of children and for detecting
children or populations not growing properly or who are under- or overweight,
requiring specific health and nutrition responses. The SCN will promote the new
growth standards in all of the activities carried out under its mandate, in
order to achieve its vision of a world free from hunger and malnutrition.
Many SCN members collaborated in and supported the realization of the Multi
Centre Growth Study led by WHO. The project was supported financially by the
Governments of Brazil, the Netherlands, Norway, Oman, and USA, and the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation. Many other governments, non-governmental organizations
and UN agencies, and in particular the United Nations University and UNICEF
actively collaborated in its realization. Further information on the study and
on the new WHO Growth Standards for Infants and Young Children can be obtained
at the WHO website (http://www.who.int/nutrition).
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