National campaign to treat acute diarrhoea launched

Pakistan's National Commission for Human Development (NCHD) has launched a national campaign to treat acute diarrhoea with Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS). Diarrhoea causes up to 30 percent of all deaths in children aged five and under across the country, mostly in remote rural areas. "Our main objective is to train one woman from every household to prepare oral rehydration solutions at home and administer them to the affected minor or adult," Dr Moazzam Khalil, head of the health programmes at the NCHD, told IRIN in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. Nearly 6.7 million women in 45 districts will be trained over the next three years under the NCHD'S national ORS campaign, set to cover about 22 million households across the South Asian nation in the next five years. The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified ORS as the single most effective life-saving solution in diarrhoea-related diseases to retain the loss of water from the body. "Basically it was designed to decrease mortality due to diarrhoea," Dr Quaid Saeed, medical officer at the WHO's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) branch, told IRIN from the western city of Peshawar. Under an ORS pilot project in 2004, the NCHD trained close to 700,000 women in five selected districts on how to prepare ORS at home through sugar, salt and water to treat diarrhoea-related diseases and help them save their medical expenses. "Some 30,000 volunteers will take part in the campaign, with about 8,000 participating presently in the first part launched this year in 16 districts - four from each of the provinces," Khalil explained. The national ORS campaign will be financed through a US $6.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation extended to the NCHD for its ongoing primary healthcare programme.