Oral rehydration solution (ORS)
AI-drafted · awaiting admin review
Who should be credited with ORS, the salt and sugar drink that has saved millions of children: Indian doctors or American researchers?
Indian contribution, later developed elsewhereMedicine & health
Indian claim
Hemendra Nath Chatterjee in Calcutta reported treating cholera with an oral salt and glucose drink in The Lancet in 1953. In 1971 Dilip Mahalanabis used ORS on a mass scale in refugee camps at Bongaon, West Bengal, cutting deaths from about 30% to about 3%.
Evidence for the Indian claim
- Chatterjee treated 186 patients with an oral solution and all survived, but his paper lacked fluid-balance data and drew little notice.
- Mahalanabis's 1971 work, published in 1973, showed that ORS could be given by untrained helpers in an emergency. It helped persuade health agencies, including the WHO, to promote ORS worldwide.
Commonly credited to
David Nalin and Richard Cash in Dhaka, and Norbert Hirschhorn and colleagues in Dhaka and Calcutta, proved in controlled trials in 1967–68 that a glucose-salt drink could replace intravenous fluids in cholera.
Evidence for the other claim
- The physiology behind ORS, glucose helping the gut absorb sodium, was worked out by US and other scientists in the early 1960s.
- The careful balance studies in Dhaka and Calcutta in 1968 are the usual starting point for modern ORS.
What historians and scientists say
ORS came from teams in India, Bangladesh and the US working together and side by side. Indian doctors gave early proof and the decisive field demonstration, and the controlled trials and physiology came from international teams.