Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
In this hospital, approximately two-thirds of the patients that are reporting here every
day are younger than age of five years, so it’s... diarrhoeal disease is predominantly
a disease of young children.
If you think the number of diarrhoeal cases that we see for young children will have two
to three attacks every year.
Think about the number of children we have in Bangladesh, and you can imagine the huge
amount of time that’s been lost for the children.
At the time they’re not going to school, then the families are tied down, the mother
is taking care of the child, she cannot do her daily work. And moreover, if... when the
adults have the diarrhoea, they can’t go to work. It’s a tremendous loss.
Dhaka is a very crowded city, there is not a good sanitation system to move the human
waste out, so in the environment there’s a human faeces and a lot of germs, and those
work their way into people’s drinking water supply, into their homes, into their food.
We estimate that about five thousand children under the age of five years die every year
in Dhaka from diarrhoeal disease.
A young child does not have the same ability to retain fluids that an adult does, so that
if a child becomes dehydrated, they can rapidly progress into circulatory collapse and shock.
So children basically die of dehydration with diarrhoea.
If you can ensure safe water, if you can ensure safe environment when looking at the proper
sewage disposal. If you can control the quality of what we are eating, what we are drinking,
and how we are disposing of our waste, I believe the problem is solved.