Improving nutritional status requires a multipronged approach, directly targeting malnutrition, coupled with economic growth, household livelihood security, social protection, access to public health services, and water and sanitation. Nutrition policy, programming, and monitoring need to reflect the immediate and underlying causes of malnutrition. Future research needs to be designed to quantify the relative contribution of underlying causes of poor nutrition, allowing practitioners to prioritize responses aimed at improving nutritional outcomes.
The proportion of slaughtered cattle tested for BSE is much smaller in the U.S. than in Europe and Japan, leaving the U.S. heavily dependent on statistical models to estimate both the current prevalence and the spread of BSE. We examine the models relied on by USDA, finding that the prevalence model provides only a rough estimate, due to limited data availability. Reassuring forecasts from the model of the spread of BSE depend on the arbitrary constraint that worst-case values are assumed by only one of 17 key parameters at a time. In three of the six published scenarios with multiple worst-case parameter values, there is at least a 25% probability that BSE will spread rapidly. In public policy terms, reliance on potentially flawed models can be seen as a gamble that no serious BSE outbreak will occur. Statistical modeling at this level of abstraction, with its myriad, compound uncertainties, is no substitute for precautionary policies to protect public health against the threat of epidemics such as BSE.
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