Monitoring the growth of the world's children.

Growth monitoring and promotion is a difficult operational strategy for communicating with mothers which is based on a simple technology of weighing and charting young children and an assumption that the undoubted early warning of future low nutritional status provided by monthly growth monitoring enables corrective action to be taken to avert death. Doubts have been expressed about the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of existing growth monitoring programmes. There is an urgent need for good demonstrations of programmes in which health professionals and communities cooperate in empowering mothers to promote their children's growth, while marshalling all the primary health care activities, and yielding valuable straightforward data on the growth of the world's children.