ORS is a sodium and glucose solution that is widely used to treat children with acute diarrhea, a serious killer of children under five worldwide. The new formula of ORS will reduce the severity of diarrhea and vomiting, the number of hospitalizations, the need for costly intravenous (IV) fluid treatment and the length of illness. It is responsible for saving the lives of millions of children worldwide.
This inexpensive and readily available intervention reduces death and suffering from dehydration caused by diarrhea. Since WHO adopted ORS in 1978 as its primary tool to fight diarrhea, the mortality rate for children suffering from acute diarrhea has fallen from 5 million to 1.3 million deaths annually.
The latest study was conducted in five developing countries among children from one month to two years old with acute diarrhea and dehydration. Its findings suggest that using the low-sodium, low-glucose ORS formulation reduces the need for intravenous fluids by 33 percent. The effect of this reduction could result in fewer children requiring hospitalization, fewer secondary infections, a diminished need to handle blood with its potentially dangerous consequences, and lower health care costs.
“ORS is a continuing success story of the partnership between WHO, UNICEF, USAID, and host coun-tries in making this life saving technology available to the children of the world,“ according to Anne Peterson, Assistant Administrator of USAID’s Bureau of Global Health. “USAID supported the development of ORS, which has saved countless lives of children over the years and is proud to have supported the research that led to the development of this new improved formulation of R-ORS.”
Use of ORS was first researched in the 1940s but it was twenty years later before the idea was developed by research institutions in Bangladesh and India for the management of severe cholera. Then conventional wisdom said only health professionals could mix and administer the solution and that its use was limited to hospitals. The use of ORS during the 1971 war between India and Pakistan provided convincing evidence that ORS could be given by non-medical personnel, volunteers and family members.
The dramatic improvement in home management of diarrhea through ORS use took place between 1990 and 1995, saving about 1 million children annually. In 1990, oral rehydration salts were used in approximately one-third of diarrhea cases, and by mid-decade the average was 85 percent among 33 reporting countries that account for almost half of the world's under-five population.
Use of the new formula ORS will begin later this year in India.
Research was conducted by scientists at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health Family and Child Survival, Baltimore, MD, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi; India; ICDDR,B: Centre for Health and Population Research, Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Boston University, Center for International Health, Ap-plied Research on Child Health, Boston, MA.
If you would like further information about this study, or to arrange interviews with authors, please contact Gina M. Coco at: (410) 614-5439 E-mail: gcoco@jhsph.edu or Barbara Costello at: (202) 328-6565 E-mail: bcostello@phn.pal-tech.com