04/11/2024
Soon after opening in the 1960’s, St. Jude leadership discussed what could be done to help heal the wounds of racial division. The conversation led them to open a clinic for underserved children, staffing it with volunteers. It was quickly evident that many of the clinic’s patients were severely malnourished.
St. Jude partnered with a local community organization called Memphis Area Project South (MAP-South) to provide food to families in desperate need. MAP-South set up a warehouse across the street from the Lorraine Motel and distributed surplus food from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This program dramatically increased our scientific knowledge about the impact of malnutrition on young children, one-quarter of low-income children were anemic, one-third had parasitic infections, 50% showed signs of stunted growth and 15% were dramatically below the average height and weight for their age. Door by door participants were recruited, picked up to be brought in, and served meals and clinically evaluated at St. Jude. MAP-South also offered social services support. Sometimes, that was the only full, nutritious meal the child received that day.
After a year of distributing food, organizers realized that the program was not effectively reaching the population most in need: children under age 2. St. Jude responded with a new initiative, enrolling thousands of babies in the poverty-stricken area in a “well baby care program.” The families were provided with specially enriched baby formula on a prescription basis.
The results of the effort were extraordinary. When properly fed, the poor infants grew at the same rate as middle-class children. Anemia plummeted to 8% in treated infants. The program showed that infant malnutrition could be eliminated at a cost of just 71 cents a day per child.
The achievement eventually spurred development of the federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Today, WIC meets the nutritional needs of 8.2 million people every month and is widely viewed as one of the most successful nutrition programs of all time. More information here: https://www.stjude.org/research/progress/2020/african-american-clinical-researcher-breaks-barriers.html
Please consider watching the “Prescription Food” documentary by WMC-TV
Read how this African American clinician and researcher has broken medical and community barriers down for the past 40 years.
