Word: ort
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...building--the closest thing the town has to a pharmacy. There, Moussa Traoré, 48--a thin, wan man--dispenses drugs with a studied seriousness. Since last year, he has prescribed 20 mg of zinc daily for about two weeks to children suffering from diarrhea. Throw in oral rehydration therapy (ORT), which has been the main weapon against diarrhea for the past few decades, and a treatment costs less than 30˘--affordable even to Sogola's desperately poor families...
...ORT has been the main treatment - in many places the only treatment - since the early 1970s, when U.N. officials first distributed sachets of sugar and salt to refugees in South Asia in an attempt to reduce cholera deaths. Today rehydration salts mixed with clean water are given to millions of poor across Africa and Asia. It works: the glucose in the water slows the exit of fluids from the body, allowing electrolytes to be absorbed through the intestinal walls and thus halting potentially deadly dehydration. (See pictures of the politics of water in Central Asia...
...intense frustration of aid groups and government officials, only about 35% of families in diarrhea-stricken countries use ORT - less than half the WHO's target. Until zinc arrived in Sogola, only about one in 10 village residents used the sachets when they or their children became ill. That number has soared since Traoré added zinc tablets to the prescription. "Mothers don't see ORT as real treatment," says Eric Swedberg, senior director of child health and nutrition at Save the Children U.S. in Westport, Conn. "But when you add the zinc you really see the effects. This...
...from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore, Md., gave children in New Delhi a daily dose of syrup containing 20 mg of zinc. The rate of diarrhea dropped dramatically. "Nobody believed the results," Fontaine says. "No one had an explanation why zinc worked." Because ORT had already proved effective in the fight against diarrhea, though, aid organizations and researchers shifted their focus elsewhere - particularly to the disastrous spread of AIDS. The delay, the WHO's Fontaine says, cost the effort "at least 10 years...
...several African governments are now looking at zinc programs. The treatment is already stirring interest among rich-country donors and drug companies: about 20 firms in countries from France to India have begun manufacturing zinc tablets during the past few years. "The private sector was never really interested in ORT," Fontaine says. "But zinc has totally taken off. It looks like real medicine and is not given out for free." (See pictures of Ethiopia's harvest of hunger...