BORUNGO KHOLA, Bangladesh — A pinch of salt. A fistful of sugar. A half liter of water.
It’s a recipe 8-year-old Mee Akter recites easily while squeezing and scooping her fingers through the air, pretending to measure just the right amount of each ingredient.
“You take the salt with three fingers,” she said. “I learned it in school last year.”
Over the past 30 years, this simple “poor man’s Gatorade” has become a cheap, trusted home remedy passed down to generations of Bangladeshi moms nationwide. It is bought or whipped up and sipped down at the first sign of diarrhea to stave off dehydration, which can drain a weak child of life in just hours.
Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries, is a leader in the fight against diarrhea, which is the No. 2 killer of children under age 5 worldwide after pneumonia. Diarrhea kills 1.5 million kids annually — more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined — and the United Nations has projected the deaths will rise by 10 percent each year over the next decade.
Rahima Begum, 45, was among the first to teach the recipe to mothers 26 years ago in Borungo Khola village, a bucolic farming community down a dirt road about 25 miles outside the capital. Then, parents had no idea what to do when diarrhea struck. If there was no hospital nearby, many kids simply died.
The Bangladesh discovery was hailed by The Lancet medical journal three decades ago as “potentially the most important medical discovery of the 20th century.” About 800 million packets of ORS, the lifesaving oral rehydration salt-sugar solution, are produced worldwide today, saving more than an estimated 50 million lives.
“When I talk to people in developed countries about diarrhea, they don’t believe me when I tell them it’s killing children,” said Dr. Olivier Fontaine, a diarrhea expert at the World Health Organization in Geneva. “We have the magic bullets, and now we need to apply them to make sure every kid has access. What we need is money to implement what we have seen in Bangladesh.”
