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Article History

Received: 13 November 2017

Accepted: 5 June 2018

First Online: 16 July 2018

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: This study performed a secondary analysis of data that had already been collected for prevalence assessment in emergency and development settings. No persons could be identified from the data. No clinical data were used. No experiments were performed on human subjects. Ethical approval for the work described in this article is not required under the Declaration of Helsinki (all revisions) and was not sought. Whenever possible, data were collected following ethical approval from locally responsible ethics committees. Some data were collected during complex emergencies when no locally responsible ethics committees were operating. In these cases ethical approval was granted solely by the institutional review bodies of the non-governmental organization (NGO) or United Nations organization (UNO) which collected the data. Permissions were sought and given by local ministries of health and, where appropriate, by local police departments and military and / or paramilitary commanders. Identifying data were collected for programmatic purposes (i.e. for recruitment of cases of acute malnutrition into feeding programs) but this data was either not entered or was removed prior to data being made available for analysis. Participation in the surveys was voluntary. Children were not (and could not be) measured without the consent of their parents or guardians. Verbal informed consent was sought from the primary caregiver of the child. Written consent is almost never sought in these types of survey: It is usually not required and levels of literacy are often low. The existence of the data is proof of consent.

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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