Miracle cure for an old scourge.

Millions of lives are saved every year thanks to the development of a simple treatment called oral rehydration salts (ORS) solution, once dubbed “potentially the most important medical advance” of the 20th century by the . Yet for years Dr Dhiman Barua, at the World Health Organization (WHO), and Dr Dilip Mahalanabis, at the Johns Hopkins International Center for Medical Research and Training in the Indian city of Kolkata, struggled to convince a sceptical medical fraternity that it could be administered by people with little or no training.