Sub-National Prevalence of wasting (% of children under 5)
UNICEF, WHO and the World Bank, recommend not using the data for wasting and severe wasting indicators to make inter-temporal comparisons.  Wasting and severe wasting indicators are very responsive to infection and changes in food availability. A child’s weight relative to its height can drop quickly but also bounce back up with appropriate interventions or a stabilization of a crisis.  Malnutrition prevalence estimates are generated from household surveys that only allow for a snapshot view at one short point in time (usually a few months long).  In addition, surveys do not capture the duration of wasting and averages during the year are unavailable.  Wasting and severe wasting thus, show fluctuations across surveys that do not necessarily reflect the whole spectrum of possible variability.  A more appropriate way to have accurate estimates for these conditions would be to use annual incidence (i.e., number of cases that occur in a population during a given year). However, estimates of incidence at national or even regional level do not exist.  Therefore, the estimates of prevalence are a proxy and should be interpreted with caution as even the presented confidence intervals may or may not span over the fluctuations that have occurred. Contrary to wasting and severe wasting, the prevalence estimates of stunting, underweight, and overweight are more stable and less reactive to rapid changes in the conditions children live in.
Wasting prevalence is the proportion of children under five whose weight for height is more than two standard deviations below the median for the international reference population ages 0-59.