WHO/UNICEF: Diarrhea Kills 1.5 Million Children Per Year
UN officials calculate that 1.5 million children per year die of diarrhea, often easily preventable:
Ann Veneman, the head of Unicef said this was a ‘tragedy.’
‘Inexpensive and effective treatments for diarrhea exist, but in developing countries only 39 percent of children with diarrhea receive the recommended treatment,’ Veneman said.
A new vaccine was developed for Rotavirus, an organism responsible for more than 40 percent of all diarrhea, but it remains out of reach in most of the developing world, the UN said.
That’s former Bush cabinet member Ann Veneman, so it’s not like this is special socialist math or anything. I find it endlessly frustrating that these kind of stories go unremarked in elite political commentary circles, but whenever there’s some pseudo-plausible argument that launching a bloody, multi-billion dollar invasion of Iraq or Sudan or Burma or whatnot everyone’s buzzing about it.
The GAVI Alliance funds a rotavirus program in conjunction with the CDC and the WHO that could almost certainly use more funding. This kind of issue is also an excellent example of the kind of health problem where we should be trying to rely more on prizes than on patents to finance R&D.
12 Responses to “WHO/UNICEF: Diarrhea Kills 1.5 Million Children Per Year”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
October 16th, 2009 at 8:49 am
We do rely much more on prizes than on patents to finance R&D. Between its several campuses and the extramural grants the National Institutes of Health oversee, the federal government runs a research enterprise several magnitudes larger than anything that came before it. Long gone are the days where corporate laboratories like Bell have the most cutting edge science, at least in the biomedical realm. Rest assured there are millions of dollars being spent on diarrheal illness yearly, and when the appropriate advances are made by academic scientists, the idea will be sold to a private corporation that will develop and distribute the drug/technology.
October 16th, 2009 at 8:53 am
As a follow-up, MY, if you’re actually interested, go to http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm and type in rotavirus as a keyword. You’ll get 62 matches for 2009. That’s 62 currently funded grants, totalling millions and millions of dollars. I guess you can quibble that a prize is awarded following completion of a task and a grant is awarded prior to, but with the huge start-up costs and expenses of biomedical science, grants make a more realistic funding mechanism.
October 16th, 2009 at 9:30 am
I saw a report on tv a few days ago (don’t remember which program) about a nonprofit that collects those little bars of soap in hotels that people barely use, sanitizes them, and donates them to areas with high mortality rates from diarrhea. It’s amazing how effective and low-tech hand washing is for reducing the spread of this virus in places with no access to vaccinations.
October 16th, 2009 at 9:43 am
I’ve begun to wonder if this annoying tendency of the political commentariat is just an example of the old “if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” phenomenon.
Specifically, how much of our skewed openness to warmaking vs. other international endeavors is based on the fact that we have this large, expensive, and truly very capable military, but don’t really have a similarly effective (and trusted) institution for attacking public health and development issues. I mean WHO and UNICEF (and UNFPA) are great, but aren’t we all more confident in the Pentagon’s ability to topple some regime than in these orgs ability to eliminate some virus or famine?
October 16th, 2009 at 9:43 am
My younger daughter had rotavirus (picked up at the hospital during a previous ER visit for asthma, unfortunately). She was in the hospital for 6 days, vomiting constantly and with terrible diarrhea. They put her on an IV drip and she was fine, but I felt very conscious that without access to good medical care she would have been dead after only a few days. It really brought home my good fortune at being born in a rich nation, and currently living in a place with excellent health care (Singapore). Oral rehydration salts are great and cheap; I agree that every effort should be made to get them in the hands of parents in the 3rd world. I can’t imagine the agony of watching your child die such a totally preventable death.
October 16th, 2009 at 10:09 am
You don’t actually have to give children potable water to keep diarrhea from killing them. You just have to give them a package of some rehydration salts that costs a few pennies to keep them from dying of diarrhea. And nobody has figured out a way to get people to stop being assholes to each other, grifting, cheating and doing healthy-seeming bullshit like worrying about calorie labeling at McDonald’s to get those salts to dying kids who shit themselves to death for want of 10c worth of sugar and salt.
WaterAid is a good charity that deals with these issues.
October 16th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Obviously a vaccinne against Rotavirus would be a great idea, and we have the obligation to try and make it as freely available as possible to people in developing countries. But it would be sad if we see it as a silver bullet and stop trying to address the bigger problem, which is the lack of clean water. Because there are plenty of other pathogens, besides Rotavirus, that can cause serious GI disease.
In areas where it’s not feasible to drill wells or get other sources of squeaky-clean water, one thing that development agencies are trying to do is distribute small bottles of chlorine that people can use to purify their water. Chlorine works pretty well, though I’ve been told it only kills bacteria and not eukaryotic parasites.
ORS work too, but much better to address the problem before the fact, I think.
October 16th, 2009 at 10:36 am
I’ll just add that the diarrhea problem has been solved a long time ago. It’s the logistics problem, the corruption problem, and the security problem that kills these kids. Stealing, fighting, and sitting on resources while kids die from neglect shouldn’t be acceptable, even to warring parties in a wasteland.
I’d like to see some kind of international treaty that made signatories devote 1% of their budget (about $25 billion in the US) to global water issues, coupled to some security language about fighting over water. You’re not going to solve the diarrhea problem as a health issue. You have to do it like it’s nuclear arms reduction, with granular verification going in all directions. It just CAN’T BE ALLOWED to have kids dying of diarrhea in your country. If it happens, a WHO inspection team comes in with full access and starts running your health department.
October 16th, 2009 at 11:24 am
It’s cost roughly $5,000 to operate a Black Hawk helicopter for one hour. If it costs a dime to save a child from dying of diarrhea, grounding a Black Hawk for two hours would provide enough funding to save 100,000 children.
The math can be done in so many ways but the bottom line is: we are a pathetic species.
October 16th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Do lefties still think the world is overpopulated? I can’t recall…
October 16th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Re: the bottom line is: we are a pathetic species.
Indeed, Max424. As a Christian, I call this Original Sin. You may call it something different, but I suspect we are talking about more or less the same unpleasant fact.
Re: Do lefties still think the world is overpopulated?
What an utterly dumb question. The answer is, of course, ‘it depends’.
October 17th, 2009 at 12:02 am
@11 Hector: “As a Christian, I call this Original Sin.”
I’ll grant you your Original Sin, Hector. Why not. Whether it involves God and apples or was randomly programmed into our DNA; we are abject sinners, and have been since the very beginning.