Children saved
Sir: In his article `The Big Lie which threatens to clean up the world' (Another voice, 7 March) Auberon Waugh quite rightly points out that five million children die of diarrhoea each year, or rather from dehydration caused by diarrhoea, and goes on to say he wished industry would turn its attention to this problem. Well, there is in fact a simple, cheap, and effective solution called Oral Rehydration Therapy. It is a combination of sugar and salts which, when mixed with water, increases the body's capacity to absorb liquid 25-fold. One sachet of ORT costs about 7 pence. Recovery from the stupor of extreme dehydration is miraculous and almost in- stantaneous. The British medical journal the Lancet has called ORT `potentially the greatest medical breakthrough of the cen- tury'. Unicef estimate that the more wide- spread application of ORT has already saved about half a million young lives a year. In fact, ORT is part of what Unicef calls a child survival revolution, as exciting as the Aids uproar is depressing.
Matthias von Boeventer
Frenchglass House, 9 St Margaret's Villas, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire
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