Simplified field assessment of nutritional status in early childhood: practical suggestions for developing countries.

This paper proposes a simple and inexpensive method for the field assessment of certain objective indicators of nutritional status in children of preschool age. It emphasizes the need for statistically valid sample selection and presents a design for randomly selecting 30 children from each of 30 village sites in each region for which quantitative inferences are to be made, the main purpose being to estimate the prevalence of protein-energy undernutrition and anaemia. The need to train indigenous paraprofessional workers as assessors and periodically to control their accuracy is stressed. The method used is limited to an estimate of the location and magnitude of common childhood malnutrition and it is recommended that it be supplemented by detailed ecological analysis to determine causal factors and propose remedial action.