Word: childrene
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...small programs have drawn little attention. But their impact has been dramatic. Zinc pills appear to halt diarrhea in its tracks. "Before, we were terrified when children's stomachs began running, because we knew some of them would die," says Sata Djialla in the Malian village of Morola. "Now our children are not dying of diarrhea...
...Sogola, the packets of tablets provided by Save the Children are kept in a rickety, but locked, wooden closet in a mud building - the closest thing the town has to a pharmacy. There Moussa Traoré, 48, a thin, wan man who's one of two residents entrusted with the closet key, dispenses drugs with a studied seriousness. Since last year he has prescribed children suffering from diarrhea with 20 mg of zinc daily for about two weeks. Throw in oral-rehydration therapy (ORT), which has been the main weapon against diarrhea for the past few decades, and a treatment...
...experts say the huge disparity is 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...
...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...
...Scientists first hit on zinc's effectiveness in the early 1990s, when researchers 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...