Did you know…

More than seventy learned societies of clinical nutrition signed a declaration in 2022 that formally recognizes access to nutritional care as a human right. Four years later, the text has barely left the hospital nutrition community.

The signing

The Vienna Declaration on the Human Right to Nutritional Care was signed on 5 September 2022 in Vienna by six continental federations of clinical nutrition (North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, plus a European federation of dietitians and a European patient forum) and by more than seventy national learned societies from every inhabited continent. Its central operative sentence reads: access to nutritional care is a human right intrinsically linked to the right to food and the right to health.

The scope, and its limit

The text is a hospital instrument. Article 1 fixes its scope to patients with disease-related malnutrition, in all settings and conditions. It does not descend to the specificity of individual micronutrient adequacy in apparently well-nourished populations, to the failure of routine serum tests to detect tissue depletion, or to the multi-decade translational lag that separates the specialist literature on physiologically native molecules from any routine clinical operationalization of it. The extension of a rights language to that ostensibly well-fed population, which is the specific project of this resource, has to be argued explicitly and cannot be assumed already covered.

A companion note to the Currents hub, where the Vienna text is read closely alongside its predecessors and the figures behind them.