Many children who could benefit from oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea still don’t receive it

In 2021, around 1.25 million people died from diarrheal diseases. Around a third of these deaths were children.

Two main factors explain why so many children still die from diarrhea, especially in poor countries: the persistence of risk factors such as poor sanitation and unsafe water, and the lack of access to effective treatment.

Here, I want to focus on the second factor: access to a particularly effective treatment, known as oral rehydration therapy (ORT), which is essentially a mixture of clean water, salts, and sugar. Simple as it may sound, researchers writing in the medical journal The Lancet called ORT “potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century.”