More than ten million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition globally each year. In Uganda, longstanding efforts to understand, treat, and then prevent the condition initially served to medicalize it, in the eyes of both biomedical personnel and Ugandans who brought their children to the hospital for treatment and care. Medicalization meant malnutrition came to be seen as a disease -- as a medical emergency -- not a preventable condition, further compromising nutritional health in Uganda.

Rather than rely on a foreign-led model, physicians in Uganda responded to this failure...

More than ten million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition globally each year. In Uganda, longstanding efforts to understand, treat, and then prevent the condition initially served to medicalize it, in the eyes of both biomedical personnel and Ugandans who brought their children to the hospital for treatment and care. Medicalization meant malnutrition came to be seen as a disease -- as a medical emergency -- not a preventable condition, further compromising nutritional health in Uganda.

Rather than rely on a foreign-led model, physicians in Uganda responded to this failure...