Published 14 October 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b4223
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b4223

News

Poor nations are told to scale up strategies to prevent and treat diarrhoea in children

John Zarocostas

1 Geneva

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Developing countries need to scale up measures that have been proved to prevent and treat diarrhoea among children, say Unicef and the World Health Organization. Every year 1.5 million children aged under 5 years die from diarrhoea, more than 80% of them in Africa and south Asia, they say in a report.

"Reducing these deaths depends largely on delivering lifesaving treatment of low osmolarity oral rehydration salts and zinc tablets to all children in need," note Ann Veneman, Unicef’s executive director, and Margaret Chan, WHO’s director general, in a foreword to the study.

However, the report observes that only 66 countries around the world have explicit national policies in place for the use of oral rehydration solutions for treating childhood diarrhoea, and only 46 countries have explicit policies to promote the use of zinc. It concludes that establishing national guidelines is an important step to reduce mortality.

Diarrhoea accounts for . . . [Full text of this article]


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