Dr. Richard Cash, who played a key role in the testing and implementation of an inexpensive and easy treatment for cholera and other diarrheal diseases that has saved tens of millions of lives, died at home in Cambridge, Mass., from brain cancer this week, his wife by his side.
He was 83. His greatest achievement — oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea — is something so simple that people can be trained to do it at home. Even so, an editorial in The Lancet in 1978 called ORT “potentially the most significant medical advance of the century.
” Cash's role in developing ORT came after he had graduated from the New York University School of Medicine and completed an internship in New York City. In the late 1960s, he headed to Dhaka — in what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh — to address the tragic toll taken by cholera. Cholera patients suffer diarrhea, which causes them to lose both salts and water.
The disease could turn you "from a grape to a raisin" in a matter of hours, he observed. At the time, it was well known that simply drinking water didn’t help. Cash and his colleagues had people drink water with carefully chosen salts and sugar, and found that the formula allowed for successful rehydration.
So long as people were conscious and could drink oral rehydration salts, they would survive. Working with others at the Cholera Research Laboratory, Cash conducted field studies proving that oral rehydration therapy is effective; a study conducted years la.
