Wordless Video for Haiti: How To Make Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) in camps, to combat cholera

Via the BB Submitterator, Liz Ditz says,

Dr. Jan Gurley (shown at left) has been going to Haiti since the earthquake, and is there now. She and friends made a video that shows you how to make Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) in the sheet camps, using salt, sugar, and bottlecaps to measure. 4 caps sugar, 1 cap salt, 500ml clean water = life. Direct link to video here. Doc Gurley hopes the video will go viral, aid workers have smart phones that can show videos & many Haitians have video-enabled cell phones. More at Doc Gurley's blog.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Anonymous

Don’t want to trivialise this but I’m going to try this as a hangover cure.
- catgrin
  
  Heya #7 – Better to use it as a preventative. Keep a bottle by the bed and drink it before you go to sleep after a night of drinking.
  
  Serious note. This can and will save lives. I think the “lost in translation” bits were due to us living with working plumbing.
  
  This page is interesting
  
  http://www.hobotraveler.com/photostoilets01.shtml
  
  especially this comment “Sink in the Real Yogi Lodge in Varanasi, India – See the bar of soap –
  This is unusual in India, an this is the sink for the toilet. Actually having a sink is not normal in India.”
TharkLord

Yes, the diarrhea bucket to hand washing transition was a bit confusing. My first thought was: “Good lord, are they washing in diarrhea?!?”.

This is also a great bit of information for those suffering from food poisoning or a severe case of the flu, either of which can lead to dehydration.
kevin

So, is it important to wash your hands in the diarrhea bucket or can this step be modified?
gmoke

I think it’s washing your hands every time you prepared the sugar/salt water but it was a little confusing.

Glad this was finally picked up. I posted it to Submitterator off of a globalvoices notice a few days ago and it got no traction at all.
sumud

This has been floating around since the quake last year, with great written instructions in Creole also, for those w/out (or maybe with) smart phone access. See the Cholera fact sheet- http://creole.hesperian.net/
Anonymous

A better soundtrack would be Handel’s “Water Music”

*ducks and runs*
jgrassick

I’ve been using this very sugar/salt water mix as an effective hangover preventer/cure for years.
Anonymous

Definitely difficult to understand the process being presented. I hope they field-tested this with their target users first!
Anonymous

So for the people living in a world ruled by metrical units of measurements how much is an usa (I presume) cup in milliliters or how much sugar goes in the water (and how much salt) in milligrams? Please, cups are confusing at best.
- Anonymous
  
  It’s not cups, it’s “caps” — as in the bottle caps of sugar and salt.
  
  Cups of sugar and salt would make for a disgusting drink unless you had gallons of water you were mixing in as well.
  
  Finally, anyone who has access to a milligram scale would probably not need to be mixing their own rehydration liquid — this recipe is for areas so poor they don’t even own spoons, according to the blog.