The target group of this study is very determined and crucial because the children with age between 6 and 59 months are at high risk to have malnutrition . The challenge we observe is to not consider all indicators for SAM because the study ignores bilateral pitting edema.

The article is not so much about MAM and SAM but about emergency medicine in setting in which MAM and SAM are prevalent,

We very much do not "ignore bilateral pitting oedema". We take care to censor cases of oedema from the analysis to avoid a potential for them polluting the results. Oedema cases were excluded because the retained fluid in oedema increases weight but this extra weight is of no interest in (e.g.) dosing calculations and could lead to overdosing. The weight without oedema is of most use in the application addressed by the article. The formulae and tables in the article attempt to give this. I think this is covered on page 4 and page 14.

Note (before someone points it out) that we did not use W/H (a commonly used indicator for SAM). We could not use W/H because it is weight that we want to estimate (i.e. weight is the unknown so W/H is unknowable).