PSI: Oral Rehydration Salts

Oral Rehydration Salts

Every year, an estimated two million children under the age of five die of dehydration from diarrhea. Children die in such shockingly high numbers because of loss of fluids during severe diarrhea. Approximately 95% of these deaths could be prevented with oral rehydration salts (ORS).

ORS is an extremely effective solution that rehydrates children and adults and replenishes body fluids. ORS was hailed as “one of the great public health success stories of our time" by Dr. Gro Brundtland, the former Director-General of WHO.

During flooding in Bangladesh, a young girl swims back to her family with a packet of ORS gripped in her mouth.

In the early 1980’s, before widespread use of ORS or other oral rehydration therapies, child deaths from diarrhea hovered around 5 million annually; this dropped to 3 million by the early 1990’s and stands are around 2 million today. These drops in child mortality have been attributed almost entirely to the use of ORS and other rehydrating fluids.

PSI began social marketing ORS in 1990, when it launched its first ORS program in Bangladesh. ORS programs that treat dehydration due to diarrhea complement PSI’s safe water programs, which prevent diarrhea. PSI is now working to combine ORS with zinc, a powerful intervention that both treats and prevents diarrhea.

PSI distributes approximately 10 million sachets of ORS each year through social marketing channels. Currently, PSI has ORS programs in Benin, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Cameroon, Haiti, India, Cote d’ Ivoire, and Burundi, as well as a Diarrhea Treatment Kit (DTK), which contains ORS and Zinc, in Cambodia and Ethiopia. Zinc supplementation can decrease the severity and duration of diarrhea, and help prevents diarrhea in the months after supplementation.

PSI is the second largest international distributor of ORS after UNICEF.

•		PSI's Water/Child Survival programs