Skip to main content

Amos is so dehydrated that he cannot even produce tears

"Amos had been ill for a week and his grandmother didn't know what was wrong or how to treat him. By the time they arrived, Amos's condition had deteriorated to the point where he was very weak and lifeless. His body was so dehydrated he couldn't even cry.

Catherine decided to walk to Mkomaindo with Amos, a long hot journey of more than nine miles. Amos's symptoms alerted doctors to the fact that he was suffering acute dehydration. At the time Catherine was distraught, obviously concerned that her grandson might die.

But Amos was prescribed Oral Rehydration Therapy. He spent two days taking Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS), a mixture of sugar, salt and water - administered every two hours which enabled his body to absorb water.

Thanks to Oral Rehydration Therapy, Amos improved dramatically and was on the road to making a full recovery."

This is UNICEF story.  Amos is dehydrated from diarrhoea.  According the data from World Health Report 2005,  dehydration caused by diarrhea kills nearly 4,800 children under the age of 5 one day,  that's over 33,500 children in one week alone, and kill s nearly 1.8 million children every year.

The Oral Rehydration Therapy is amazingly simple. It's a mixture of salt and sugar that, when added to water and given to a child suffering from sever dehydration, can bring a child quickly back to health.

Sometime I just couldn't believe it due to my own experience and shocked by the statistics, for example, how can a influenza or diarrhea kill people and so many? How could people not know just to give their child salt and sugar water solution to help preventing dehydration? People don't know their children thirsty?

A single sachet costs just 4p, and made of  salt and sugar, here are the ingredients:

  • Glucose anhydrous food grade 13.5 g

  • Sodium chloride BP 98 2.6 g

  • Trisodium citrate dihyrate BP 98 2.9 g

  • Potassium chloride BP 98 1.5 g

There are scientific names for sugar and salt!  If you couldn't find this kind of Oral Rehydration Salt sachet, you simply make it for yourself mixing the following:

  • 1 liter/quart of purified water

  • 1/2 teaspoon of table salt

  • 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda

  • 8 teaspoons of sugar or 2 teaspoons of Karo syrup

  • 1/4 teaspoon of salt substitute (provides potassium)

This is there suggestion from Palo Alto Medical foundation website, and other recipes for making rehydration solution.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Does pearls reproduce by itself through time

At the request of several families he and Mrs Legge gave a home for some months to a young Dutch girl, a granddaughter of the first Dutch governor of the Straits Settlements. She had several pearls of which the Dutch residents were great collectors, got from oysters found in a river of the Malay Peninsula, when she left them she gave Mrs Legge a small box containing a large pearl the size of a pea, with a blue spot on it, and two others not so large. This box was then put away and locked up. Several weeks later he took it out and on opening it discovered more than a dozen pearls, most of them very small. Astonished at the phenomenon he called his chief servant, a Portuguese, who happened to enter the room and who expressed no surprise but declared it to be a common occurrence. On enquiry he found that many of the Dutch people had jars of pearls, large and small, which had accumulated in this way. Some years later he related the incident at dinner on board ship. The captain was a cautio
Post a Comment
Read more

Bidmas, Bedmas, Bodmas, Pedmas And Christmas

This BBC GCSE Bitesize post says, BODMAS stands for 'brackets', 'other', 'division', 'multiplication', 'addition' and 'subtraction'. It's the order in which we carry out a calculation. But another article says, the order of operations in Maths called BIDMAS. BIDMAS stands for Brackets, Indices, Division and Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction. The difference is that the second substitute 'o' with 'i', and we can understand that teacher normally chooses easy way to explain whose pupils can understand, exponent or power or indices are out of reach of foundation students, so teachers uses 'other' instead. And in this article , 'o' actually stands for 'order', as far as my memory can go, my English teacher never teach me 'order' actually means 'Powers and Square Roots, etc.' In United States, the mnemonic fo Order of Operation is PEMDAS, because brackets are called pa
Post a Comment
Read more

Panic or panick

There is only one spelling for panic ; the verb is inflected 'panic, panics, panicked, and panicking’. The form panick is used for progressive tense, past tense and past participle. We don't write panick today, though English speakers from a few hundred years ago might have (in the same way they might have written musick). When the alternate spelling “panick” is used for the past participle: "I panicked last night at the disco." When it’s use for progressive tense: “Invariably, when markets are panicking, they sell the stocks quickly.” It's the rule for root words ending in "c" is that you have to add “k”, so the spelling is related with the pronunciation. If we don't add the <k>, it looks as if the <c> has to be pronounced /s/. If the "k" was not there, “panicing” would look like the word which is supposed to be pronounced as if it is ended in "sing," while “paniced” would be pronounced like “panised”. The same
1 comment
Read more