50 anti-diarrhoea awareness camps to be set up on Nov 15 in Capital

New Delhi, Nov 8 : Contributing towards the anti-diarrhoea mission of the government, one of the leading donor organisations in the country will set up more than 50 awareness camps all over the Capital and NCR on November 15 to educate the masses about the killer disease, which also interferes with the polio vaccine uptake in children.

In addition, free packets of Zinc and ORS tablets, which are a major deterrent of the disease as recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO), will also be distributed on the same day.

''The main objective of the camps would be to bring awareness of the rampant incidences of the disease to the rural and urban masses and educate them of the zinc tablets and ORS available in the market,'' Chairman of India National Polio Plus Society Deepak Kapur said today.

In order to highlight its importance, the society, which is a part of Rotary International, a non-profit organisation, has also decided to mark the day as ''Zinc and ORS Divas''.

Mr Kapur said, ''Diarrhoea kills nearly 5 lakh children in the country every year. However, most of the people do not know that there have been remedies, like Zinc and ORS, devised to counter the problem and that too at an affordable cost.'' He added that the disease was more endemic in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar due to poor sanitation, malnourishment, poor hygiene and contaminated drinking water.

According to a recent report by UNICEF, out of a total of 2.5 billion people worldwide that defecate openly, 665 million belong to India. Some 88 per cent of diarrhoea deaths worldwide are attributable to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.

Mr Kapur informed that meeting of the India Expert Advisory Group for Polio Eradication (IEAG) was also held last week in the capital to discuss about the Government's Polio Eradication Strategy.

''Various points under the government's National Zinc Policy adopted to use zinc and Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) in the treatment of diarrhoea under the National Rural Health Mission were discussed in it,'' he said.

The NGO has also signed an MoU with the Indian Academy of Paediatrics to make the campaign successful.

''One possible reason for polio virus persistence in these states is high diarrhoea incidence. The stomach of children suffering from diarrhoea becomes like a bucket with a hole. You keep on pouring the polio vaccine but it does not stay there long enough to build immunity,'' Dr Naveen Thacker, Former President of the Indian Academy of Paediatrics, informed.

''Each diarrhoea episode causes damage to intestinal mucosa and hampers its absorption capacity for a long time which interferes with vaccine uptake, making these children susceptible to the polio virus,'' he added.

--UNI

(c) 2009 Published with permission from United News of India.
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