By Robert Evans

GENEVA, Oct. 6 (Reuters) - The international medical charity MSF called on Monday for food aid to be based on dairy products and eggs instead of cereals, saying this could save the lives of tens of thousands of hungry children.

MSF, Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), said that donor governments should earmark 3.5 billion euros ($4.8 billion) a year for the distribution of such rations with added vitamins, minerals and protein.

"Currently, food programmes targeted at moderately malnourished children are mainly cereal-based and lack many of the nutrients young children need," Christophe Fournier, president of MSF's International Council, told a news briefing.

He said a switch to dairy and egg products, which may be in the form of concentrates or nutrition bars, would greatly reduce the number of child deaths -- now running at about 3 to 3.5 million a year among malnourished children under the age of 5.

Fournier said cereal-based food aid products, largely fortified blended flours based on wheat or corn plus soy, could not protect already malnourished children from disease.

He was speaking after a meeting of child nutrition experts in Geneva last week, where United Nations officials said there was a general consensus that such a switch would help fight manlnutrition. Conclusions and recommendations from that meeting are not expected to be announced for weeks or months.

Fournier said MSF would push the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and other international groups involved in food aid distribution to act quickly on the change.

At the same time, national governments and donors needed to free up funding in place to implement the switch that would push up food aid costs, he added.

"Not doing so would be endorsing the double standards under which we would continue to give food to children in poor nations that we would not give to our own children," he said.

Most food aid sent to poor countries by the United States is cereal-based, MSF said. While the European Union provides funds for the purchase of food rather than supplying it direct, it does not specify the type to be bought.

MSF runs programmes in 22 countries, treating over 150,000 malnourished children with therapeutic and supplemental food. It has recently instituted a policy of treating all of them with at least some animal source food. (Editing by Laura MacInnis and Tim Pearce)

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