Word: diarrhea
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Diarrhea has been ignored by the rich world for decades. For many people outside Africa, the continent's calamitous health problems are largely defined by two epidemics: AIDS and malaria. There is a World AIDS Day and a World Malaria Day, and countless medical researchers work to combat the two diseases. In 2008 about 60% of the world's funding for research into major epidemics went to AIDS and malaria; diarrhea received a tiny fraction in comparison. Just 4% of all U.S. funding for research into major developing-world epidemics in 2007 went to diarrhea. The European Commission has given...
...experts say the huge disparity comes because most diarrhea victims are poor children--invisible to politicians--and because diarrhea itself makes people squeamish. As Time pointed out in an international cover story three years ago, celebrities don't hold concerts for diarrhea. "Compared with malaria and AIDS, we are totally underfunded," says Fontaine. "This is truly a neglected disease...
...officials like Fontaine hope that zinc becomes so standard that it will be "like having Band-Aids at home." A second medical breakthrough should also help. At least one-third of all diarrhea deaths among young children are caused by the rotavirus, which infects the cells lining the small intestine and causes gastroenteritis. In June the WHO approved the first rotavirus vaccine for global use. The vaccine, which in trials in Latin America, Europe and the U.S. cut rotavirus infections 85%, could someday be part of routine vaccination programs for children, along with those for polio, measles and other diseases...
...doesn't have to go far to find that. In Morola, a village of some 500 people nestled among mango trees near the Guinea border, locals say diarrhea deaths have fallen sharply since zinc tablets were distributed last year. When I visited in May, the village chief gathered five women to talk about their lives. The group had lost seven children among them, four to diarrhea. Kinza Diallo, 29, said that when her 1-year-old daughter contracted diarrhea in 2004, she clutched her on the back of a motorbike for the hour's ride to the nearest hospital, where...
...same story in Sogola. Suleiman Djarra was, in fact, one of the village's last diarrhea victims. Aiseta Traoré watched in horror last February when another of her sons, Ablaye, developed symptoms similar to Suleiman's. "I was terrified," she says. But once she started administering the tablets to her 2-year-old, he "came back to life," Traoré says. Some 3 million children have died of diarrhea since Suleiman did. Now donors and governments have a chance to end this global tragedy. Let's hope they...