Want to save the world? Well, save the lives of at least 1,600,000 children a year for starters? All it takes is a simple course of zinc tablets administered at the first sign of diarrhea. How much? It costs less than £0.20p ($0.30) to save the life of a child. We hear a lot about AIDS and malaria but diarrhea kills more children than either, in fact it is the second most common cause of death in infants (down from first and now just below pneumonia).
Vivienne Walt, writing in this week's TIME has a moving article entitled The Great Zinc Breakthrough.
She writes:
It is hard to grasp the impact diarrhea has on people's lives across Africa and Asia. The disease kills more children than either malaria or AIDS, stunts growth, and forces millions — adults and children alike — to spend weeks at a time off work or school, which hits both a country's economy and its citizens' chances of a better future. In countless villages like Sogola, where people have long drawn water from unreliable wells, diarrhea kills so many that there is a general sense of resignation, as if watching children die is simply one of life's inevitable tragedies.The Gates Foundation and Save the Children are changing all that.
But now a quiet revolution is under way. Over the past few years, a handful of aid organizations and governments — including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development — have begun distributing zinc supplements to villagers in Bangladesh, India, Mali and Pakistan. Several other groups are working with governments in Africa to introduce zinc, which comes both in tablet form and as a syrup. In Mali, Save the Children U.S. used $680,000 from a 2007 charity concert of American Idol to distribute zinc tablets to a handful of villages in the south of the country.Read more here...
See also A simple pill saves lives
Healing: The unexpected properties of zinc
