‘In rural India, children receive wrong treatments for deadly ailments’

NEW DELHI: Few health care providers in rural India know the correct treatments for childhood diarrhoea and pneumonia — two deadly diseases affecting young children worldwide.

But even when they do, they rarely prescribe them properly, according to a new Duke University study to be published on Monday.

“The Know-Do Gap in Quality of Health Care for Childhood Diarrhoea and Pneumonia in Rural India” will be published online by JAMA Pediatrics.

Medical practitioners typically fail to prescribe lifesaving treatments such as oral rehydration salts (ORS). Instead, they typically prescribe unnecessary antibiotics or other potentially harmful drugs, said Manoj Mohanan, a professor in Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and lead author of the study.

“Our results show that in order to reduce child mortality, we need new strategies to improve diagnosis and treatment of these key childhood illnesses,” Mohanan said. “Our evidence on the gap between knowledge and practice suggests that training alone will be insufficient. We need to understand what incentives cause providers to diverge from proper diagnosis and treatment.”

Diarrhoea and pneumonia accounted for 24 per cent of deaths among children 1 to 4 years old, totalling approximately 2 million deaths worldwide in 2011. Bihar, where the study was conducted, has an infant mortality rate of 55 per 1000 live births, the highest in the country.