By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA, March 10 (Reuters) - A pinch of salt, a handful of sugar and some clean water is all that is needed to save up to two million children who die each year from diarrhoea, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday.

Children in poor countries suffer the dehydrating condition on average about four times a year, according to the United Nations agency.

Instead of focusing on ways to stop diarrhoea from striking, the WHO said health authorities ought to ensure care-givers know how to use the rehydrating recipe, which can be home-made.

"Given the consequences of the disease in terms of persisting child mortality, the level of urgency in dealing with this problem is very different than for other chronic diseases," the authors of a study in the PLos Medicine (Public Library of Science) journal said.

"This should be reflected in health research policies and investment strategies of the major donors."

Four children die every minute from diarrhoea, which causes one-fifth of all child deaths worldwide, with most concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

"We have very effective products. The problem is not now to develop new products," WHO child health expert Olivier Fontaine, one of the authors of the PLos study told a Geneva news briefing. "We have to find ways of delivering this product to the people who need it."

Diarrhoea is defined by the WHO as the passage of three or more loose or liquid stools per day, normally the symptom of gastrointestinal infection which can be caused by bacterial, viral, and parasitic organisms. Severe loss of body fluid can lead to death.

Diarrhoea can spread through contaminated food or drinking water, or from person-to-person as a result of poor hygiene.

Oral rehydration salts, which cost about 30 U.S. cents per treatment cycle are often handed out by aid groups to stop diarrhoeal outbreaks among refugee populations and after natural disasters.

But the rehydrating solution can also be home-made with the salt, sugar and water recipe, said Fontaine.

LACK OF ACCESS

Still, in many cases, care-givers lack access to clean water to make the drink. In economically-stricken Zimbabwe, which is suffering an epidemic of diarrhoeal cholera, people were unable to buy the ingredients for the home-made rehydration formula as the government in Harare had instructed them to do.

Breastfeeding can also fortify infants against potential health hazards they encounter later in life, according to that report, compiled by experts at the WHO as well as hospitals and research centres in the United States, Britain, India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Croatia.

Diarrhoea and pneumonia cause more child deaths each year worldwide than all the annual deaths attributable to smoking in all ages, and twice the annual global HIV/AIDS death toll.

"The persisting high mortality from diarrhoea in the presence of existing cost-effective interventions and available resources to implement them represents a continuing scandal," the authors said in the PLoS Medicine report.

Leading nations pledged a decade ago at the United Nations to reduce the number of child deaths by two-thirds by 2015. Without major gains against diarrhoea, the WHO said "the world will fail to achieve" that Millennium Development Goal. (Additional reporting by Jonathan Lynn; Editing by Matthew Jones) (For the full report, see: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000041) (For more information on health and development issues, see www.alertnet.org)

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