Indian children prescribed wrong medication for diarrhoea and pneumonia
Very few health care providers in rural India know the correct treatment for children suffering from diarrhoea and pneumonia - and even when they do, they prescribe the wrong drugs. This is the shocking finding of a recently published study by Manoj Mohanan, a professor at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. It throws fresh light on why so many young Indian children die of these two ailments, which are responsible for a third of deaths of children under five in the country. In 2013, 300,000 Indian children died from pneumonia and diarrhoea.
Very few health care providers in rural India know the correct treatment for children suffering from diarrhoea and pneumonia - and even when they do, they prescribe the wrong drugs.
This is the shocking finding of a recently published study by Manoj Mohanan, a professor at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. It throws fresh light on why so many young Indian children die of these two ailments, which are responsible for a third of deaths of children under five in the country. In 2013, 300,000 Indian children died from pneumonia and diarrhoea.
"We know from previous studies that providers in rural settings have little medical training and their knowledge of how to treat these two common and deadly ailments is low," Mohanan says.
"Eighty per cent in our study had no medical degree. But much of India's rural population receives care from such untrained providers, and very few studies have been able to rigorously measure the gap between what providers know and what they do in practice."
The study, which appeared in the February issue of the journal , involved 340 health care providers in the eastern state of Bihar. The state has an infant mortality rate of 55 per 1,000 live births, the highest in the country.
Researchers began by asking providers how they would diagnose and treat these conditions.