The Federal Ministry of Health has restated its commitment to provide enabling environment to stimulate local production of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food, RUTF to stem the challenges of malnutrition in Nigeria.
RUTF is an energy-dense, mineral- and vitamin-enriched food that requires no preparation and is specifically designed to treat severe acute malnutrition, SAM.
Head Nutrition Division of the ministry Chris Isokpunwu said one of the strategies adopted by government to encourage local production of RUTF was to include it in the list of essential medicines to foster its availability in Nigeria.
He said only one company was locally producing RUTF in Nigeria at the moment, the ministry monitored the procurement of RUTF by UNICEF and most of the RUTF distributed were procured locally.
It would be recalled that the Federal Ministry of Health disbursed over N1.8 billion for the prevention and treatment of malnutrition in 18 States between 2017 and 2018.
