Doctor who pioneered ORS use dies
NEW DELHI: Dr Dhiman Barua, who died two months short of his 100th birthday, was a cholera and diarrhoeal diseases expert whose work on promoting oral rehydration salts (ORS) solution — called “potentially the most important medical advance” of the 20th century by The Lancet — is continuing to save millions of lives every year.
Born to a family of doctors and traditional medicine practitioners in Rangoon, Burma (now Nay Pyi Taw in Myanmar), which was then a part of undivided India, his family moved to his ancestral village near Chittagong, then a part of undivided India, when he was four.
A scholarship to study for a medical licence in Chittagong Medical School in the late 1930s changed his life, and he witnessed first-hand the effects of the Bengal famine. He held a
short-commission posting during World War II.
On his commanding officer’s advice, he joined Calcutta Medical College for a medical degree, did his doctoral work in Lucknow, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at The Pasteur Institute in Paris and The London School of Tropical Medicine.
Dr Barua began working for the World Health Organization in 1965 with the cholera control team based in Manila,and in 1966, he moved to the WHO head office in Geneva as a medical officer working on cholera and other diarrhoeal diseases. In 1978, he established the Diarrhoeal Diseases Control Programme, under which health workers were trained in the use of ORS to save lives.
“My first memory of cholera was when I was eleven. The village in what is today Bangladesh was dying of cholera. I asked the doctor why and he told me that the only treatment was intravenous saline and, without it, people die. Before my eyes, the doctor, his wife – who was related to me – and their two daughters died. Our household was not affected, but most households in the village were affected. People died like flies. That was really shocking,” he said in an interview to WHO in 2009.
“A one-litre bottle (of IV saline) was so heavy that to transport it by air was many times more expensive than the fluid itself. These circumstances obliged us think about alternatives to IV fluid in oral rehydration,” said Dr Barua, who, along with Dr Dilip Mahalanabis at the Johns Hopkins International Center for Medical Research and Training in Kolkata, struggled for years to convince clinicians that ORS could be administered by people with no training.
Things changed at the end of 1970, when a Swiss company succeeded in packaging the ingredients in aluminium foil bags to prevent absorption of moisture and caking of the powder. Dr Barua described this a great discovery.
“After retirement, he embraced IT and with the help of many helping hands, taught himself to read more online.... He developed a dementing illness in the last years of his life, but he maintained a cheerful attitude to his devastating loss of autonomy,” said his son Dr Basab Barua, a retired general physician, in Windsor, UK.