Dr Dilip Mahalanabis
Source: Indian Express
GS II: Indian History
What is discussed under Dr Dilip Mahalanabis?
- About Dr Dilip Mahalanabis
- History Behind the ORS Discovery
- About ORS
Why in News?
Dr. Dilip Mahalanabis, the physician who pioneered the treatment for dehydration, Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS), dead on Sunday at a Kolkata hospital (October 16).
About Dr Dilip Mahalanabis
- Dr. Mahalanabis was born in West Bengal on November 12, 1934.
- Educated in Kolkata and London before joining the Johns Hopkins University International Centre for Medical Research and Training in Kolkata in the 1960s to do research on oral rehydration treatment.
- Dr. Mahalanabis worked for WHO in cholera control in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Yemen from 1975 to 1979.
- During the 1980s, he served as a WHO consultant on bacterial disease control studies.
- Dr Mahalanabis developed ORS while working in overcrowded refugee camps during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, which the Lancet named ‘the most important medical innovation of the twentieth century’.
- Columbia University awarded Dr Dilip Mahalanabis and Dr Nathaniel F Pierce the Pollin Prize in 2002, which is considered the equivalent of Nobel in peadiatrics.
History Behind the Discovery
- When the 1971 war broke out, millions of civilians fled to India from East Pakistan.
- Clean drinking water and sanitation were issues in these refugee camps, and cholera and diarrhoea spread among weary and thirsty residents.
- Dr. Mahalanabis and his colleagues were working at one of these camps in Bongaon.
- Intravenous fluid supplies were running low, and there weren’t enough skilled workers to perform the IV therapy.
- Dr. Mahalanabis understood from his study that a sugar and salt solution that increased water absorption by the body may save lives.
- He and his colleagues then made salt and glucose solutions in water and began putting them in huge barrels where patients and their families could assist themselves.
- The death rate in Dr Mahalanabis’ camp was soon reduced to 3%, compared to 20% to 30% in camps that simply used intravenous fluids.
- Dr Dhiman Barua, WHO’s chief of the Bacterial Diseases Unit, visited Dr Mahalanabis’ camp and began popularising the ORS technique of therapy.
About ORS
- Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS) is a simple, efficient dehydration treatment that is used all over the world.
- It consists of 22 gm glucose (as commercial monohydrate), 3.5 gm sodium chloride (as table salt) and 2.5 gm sodium bicarbonate (as baking soda) per liter of water.
- It is a simple and cost-effective technique for avoiding diarrhoeal infections such as cholera, which is one of the main causes of death in newborns and young children in many underdeveloped nations, where the patient dies of dehydration.
- One of the benefits of ORS is that even untrained individuals may give it and keep the crisis under control until the patient is brought to the hospital.
- It includes electrolytes in the proper quantities and is given to newborns and adults who have diarrhoea.
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