Chelsea Clinton's work for affordable medicine in Nigeria

Chelsea Clinton is getting involved in her parents Clinton Health Initiative to help prevent diarrhea in Nigeria. Dehydration is a rampant problem in undeveloped areas and very few of the people who live there have access to treatments.

From Reuters Alert Net, writer Julie Steenhuysen interviewed Clinton about the Initiatives’ effort in Nigeria.

"It is unconscionable that in the 21st century, children still die of diarrhea," Clinton told Reuters in an exclusive interview by phone from Abuja, Nigeria.

The ORS and zinc work in Nigeria is in coordination with the Clinton Health Access Initiative or CHAI, on whose board Clinton serves. She has stepped up her public role in the family's global philanthropic efforts and in July took a six-day tour of Africa with her father, who founded the William J. Clinton Foundation in 2001.

The goal of the initiative in Nigeria is to help drive down the cost of high-quality ORS and zinc treatments and increase awareness for them, said Clinton, currently a doctoral candidate in international relations at the University of Oxford.

Currently, fewer than 2 percent of children in Nigeria have access to the World Health Organization-recommended treatment. Increasing the number of children with access to the therapy to 80 percent by 2015 would help prevent an estimated 220,000 deaths in Nigeria.

"I would like to see us make real, measurable progress here in Nigeria and in the other countries where we are working on ORS zinc," said Clinton, including Uganda and parts of India, as part of the Clinton Health Access Initiative's new push to improve access to essential medicines for children.

"For me, it's not complicated. We know what works and we should be doing more of it. And when we don't know what works, we should be innovating and spending time and energy on designing these solutions to solve problems that haven't been solved yet," said Clinton.

New drug reduces infant deaths from diarrhea by 60 percent

A couple of new studies find that the drug Rotarix can reduce deaths amongst babies with diarrhea. The studies have raised hopes throughout Africa and other under-developed countries on improving survival rates from diarrhea. One of the studies in the New England Journal of Medicine found a 61 percent reduction in deaths for infants using the Rotarix vaccine.

From University World News, reporter Munyaradzi Makoni gives us more detail on the study results.

The research, published in December in the New England Journal of Medicine, reported on a clinical trial involving nearly 5,000 infants from high mortality, low-income settings in South Africa and Malawi. Its aim was to examine the efficiency of the vaccine among infants during the first year of life.

Rotavirus causes severe diarrhoea in children under the age of five in both developed and developing countries, and especially in Africa.

"The priority is to ensure that children in Africa, who account for 40% of the 530,000 deaths that occur annually from rotavirus, gain access to this life-saving vaccine," Professor Shabir Madhi, the clinical trial study author and a professor of vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) told University World News.

Sub-Saharan Africa has around 18% of the world's under-five population. "The expeditious introduction of rotavirus vaccine in Sub-Saharan African countries would therefore result in significant inroads being made in reducing under-five deaths and assisting countries in achieving the UN millennium developmental goal of reducing under-five mortality by two-thirds compared to 1990 levels," he said.

Madhi said that while progress in combating the illness was being made in South Africa, where the vaccine became available in the public immunization programme in 2009, the same is not true in other African countries.

Video: the story of Savita

The Guardian presents this story from Save The Children about another preventable death of a child in India. Savita died of diarrhea at the age of two.