South Africa
#Cholera: A simple recipe to save lives─── 13:27 Mon, 10 Jul 2023
A litre of water. A fistful of sugar. A half-teaspoon of salt. This recipe saves 600,000 children from dying every year.
That's the recipe for one major evidence-based public health breakthrough: oral rehydration therapy (ORT), which has helped cut childhood deaths from diarrhoea and dehydration in half and saved millions of lives.
In 1960, a chemist discovered that the presence of glucose in the small intestine makes it easier for dehydrated people to absorb sodium and fluids. Within a decade, field researchers had put the discovery to work, showing that giving children suffering from cholera and diarrhoea a cocktail made of water, sugar, and salt, dramatically reduced death rates.
Today, ORT is credited with helping cut the number of deaths of children under age 5 from some 1.2 million per year to 600,000. In many developing nations, nearly every child suffering from diarrhoea receives ORT, in either a prepackaged or homemade form. But in about 15 poor nations, the therapy is still vastly underutilised, studies suggest. And researchers estimate expanding its use could cut global deaths by another 90%, to fewer than 60,000 per year.
