Why shouldn children benefit from oral rehydration solutions for calves?
When I was a veterinary student, in the early 1960s, diarrhoea was regarded entirely as an infection; antibiotics were the automatic remedy. During my final year, an exciting innovation was intravenous fluid therapy for calves with acute diarrhoea. Too expensive for widespread use, it never matched the success of similar treatment for human cholera, yet the practical problems of treating calf diarrhoea on farms were not much different from those of treating cholera in primitive surroundings. Indeed, as well as the general similarities in the pathophysiology of acute diarrhoea in any species, the then prevalent cause of calf diarrhoea, Escherichia coli enterotoxin, and cholera are similar. Oral rehydration for acute diarrhoea was first suggested by remarkable clinical research by W B O’Shaughnessy reported in the Lancet in 1831, within months of the arrival of a terrifying new disease from Asia cholera. Sadly his wisdom was not appreciated until the 1970s, with the arrival of the World
