Richard Cash’s experience in Bangladesh
Dr. Richard Cash, who helped to develop oral rehydration therapy (ORT) for the treatment of severe diarrhea, never even thought about taking a patent out on his product. His experience illuminates the road not travelled for Plumpy’nut, the patented “miracle food” for malnourished children.
I asked Cash after class at Harvard’s School of Public Health earlier this week whether he had ever sought a patent for ORT. He said that as a member of the US Public Health Service (with the NIH) in 1968, he doesn’t think patenting was an option for him or his colleagues. Also, he admitted, it never really crossed his mind. Perhaps if it had, he said with a twinkle in his eye, he might not still be teaching at the School of Public Health.
Did the lack of a patent make it more difficult to get businesses to consider manufacturing and marketing ORT? Yes, at first, he said. Business people he talked to didn’t believe that they could make money through branding the product rather than on the basis of an exclusive monopoly. And yet, “look at aspirin,” Cash pointed out. “There hasn’t been a patent on aspirin for years and yet people still make money selling it.”
ORT, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is a very basic combination of a pinch of salt, a handful of sugar and 500 ml of clean water, that replaces the electrolytes lost during a bout of severe diarrhea. It doesn’t cure diarrhea but it prevents deaths from severe diarrhea, particularly in situations where access to medical care is severely limited. ORT has saved literally millions of lives over the past 40 years.
Cash and others worked with BRAC, the giant non-governmental organization in Bangladesh, to teach women how to stir up their own ORT solutions and treat their children on their own in the 1970s. (Hence the basic recipe of a pinch of salt, a handful of sugar and 500 ml of clean water. How do you get poor women to approximate 500 ml of water when they don’t have measuring cups of their own? You take one measuring cup and fill up each woman’s own pot with 500 ml of water. She then puts a mark on her own cooking pot or pan showing where the fill line is for 500 ml.)
A number of businesses also now sell packets of ORT to NGOs, governments, international travellers and the like. If you’ve ever given Pedialyte (made by Abbott Labs) to treat one of your kids who has been sick all night vomiting or with diarrhea, you can thank Richard Cash and his public health colleagues for figuring out, testing and validating the original formula.
The Richard Cash’s experience in Bangladesh by Peanut Butter and Patents, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
