ABOUT US

Overview

Malnutrition Crisis

The RUTF Solution

Local Production

Goals

Contact Us

About Project Peanut Butter

Project Peanut Butter is a therapeutic feeding program for malnourished children in Malawi and Sierra Leone, on the continent of Africa. It was founded by Professor Mark Manary, M.D., a pediatrician at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and a professor of pediatric medicine at Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Manary has worked in Africa for more than two decades, finding his calling solving the problem of severe malnutrition among the world’s most impoverished and malnourished children. He is recognized the world over as a leading authority on severe childhood malnutrition.
 
Dr. Manary was the first to conduct clinical trials of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), a peanut/dairy/vitamin/mineral food that offers a 95% recovery rate for severely malnourished children and is administered in the home. This represents a vast improvement over the milk-based formulas of the recent past that offered dismal recovery rates of 25% - 40% and required hospitalization, subjecting children to infectious agents when their malnourished bodies were less able to withstand this additional burden.
 
In 2007, the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition, the World Health Organization and UNICEF issued a joint statement, establishing Dr. Manary’s community-based treatment protocols and formula as the most effective method by which to treat severely malnourished children the world over.
 
Project Peanut Butter’s factory and medical teams serve thousands of children each year in rural villages in Malawi and Sierra Leone, transporting life-saving RUTF, doctors and nurses to remote locations at two week intervals until recovery occurs. Project Peanut Butter trains local health service workers to assess pediatric malnutrition levels, encourage local participation and assist teams of medical professionals on site visits. PPB also supports the efforts of UNICEF, Médecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation and numerous other relief organizations by making RUTF available at cost for provision to thousands of additional severely malnourished children on the African continent.
 
Project Peanut Butter is committed to the eradication of severe childhood malnutrition in the developing world, and welcomes the partnership and support of like-minded individuals and organizations in our endeavor to provide urgently needed, life-saving treatment to severely malnourished children in Africa.