Diarrhea and ARI in rural areas of Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh, one third of the total child death burden is due to diarrhea. Every year, a rural child suffers on average from 4.6 episodes of diarrhea, from which about 230,000 children die. In this study, information was collected from 8,287 children under five years of age and 7,082 caretakers in 120 clusters chosen by a two-stage random cluster sampling method. As compared to the baseline survey, carried out in 1996, children now are about 30% less likely to suffer from diarrhea, and the risk of dying has been reduced by 60%. Although the 2-weeks prevalence of acute respiratory infection (ARI) has risen from 39% (1996) to 46% and that of Acute Respiratory Infections needing assessment (ANA) from 12.4% to…