Professor Stanley G Schultz from the Department of Integrative Biology and Pharmacology, Houston Medical School, University of Texas, is the awardee in the field of medicine, the director-general of the Foreign Ministry's Department of Informa-tion, Kitti Wasinondh, told a press conference yesterday.

The awardees for the field of Public Health are Dr David R Nalin, former director of Vaccine Scientific Affairs at Merck & Co's Vaccine Division in Pennsylvania; Dr Richard A Cash, senior lecturer at the Department of Population and International Health, Harvard University School of Public Health in Boston, and Dr Dilip Mahalanabis, director of the Society for Applied Studies, a non-governmental research organisation in Calcutta, India.

Their Majesties the King and the Queen will grant an audience and confer the Prince Mahidol Award 2006 - comprising medals, certificates and a total of US$50,000 (Bt1.8 million) - to the awardees on January 31 at the Chakri Throne Hall in the Grand Palace compound, said Siriraj Hospital dean Dr Piyasakol Sakolsatayatorn.

The four, selected from among 59 nominees in 29 countries, dedicated their careers during the 1960s and the 1970s to the discovery, introduction, and widespread use of Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS) or Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT).

Prior to this simple, inexpensive but effective treatment for severe diarrhoea, the World Health Organisation reported that five million children under the age of five had died annually from severe diarrhoea.

The ORT was hailed by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet as "the 20th century's most important medical discovery".

Each year some 500 million ORS packs are used in more than 60 developing countries, saving millions of lives.

In the 1960s Schultz and his team demonstrated that glucose and sodium absorption in the small intestine was intimately coupled, and glucose could facilitate the absorption of sodium and water. This work provided the scientific foundation for the use of ORS (a mixture of salt, sugar and water) in the treatment of dehydration in diarrhoea patients.

The research work conducted by Nalin, Cash and Mahalanabis sequentially contributed to the use of ORS to treat severe diarrhoea around the world.

In the 1960s, Nalin, Cash and their US National Institutes of Health colleagues assigned to the Pakistan-SEATO Cholera Research Laboratory in Dhaka conducted the first successful clinical trial of ORT, which became a landmark for subsequently applying this treatment worldwide.

This treatment was tested in Matlab and then used by the Johns Hopkins University's International Centre for Medical Research and Training (ICMRT) in Calcutta in refugee camps during the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971.

Mahalanabis worked on ORT in 1966 as a research investigator for ICMRT. During the 1971 war he used ORT to treat more than 3,000 patients in West Bengal refugee camps - the first large-scale use of ORS in a disaster situation. The use of ORT decreased the death rate to 3 per cent from 20 to 30 per cent when intravenous fluid therapy was the only treatment.

As the treatment is nearly 40 years old and so commonly used, Professor Sirirung Songsivilai said the search for the originators of ORS and ORT took years to trace back through medical histories - and one year of detailed study to narrow down the four winners.

Sirirung was a member the Prince Mahidol Award's 15-member Scientific Advisory Committee that screened the candidate shortlist before the board of trustees unanimously chose the winners on November 1.

Kenneth L Foster of the US Embassy, speaking on behalf of American Ambassador Ralph Boyce, said he believed all Americans would be proud that three Americans received the Prince Mahidol Award 2006 and thanked the organisers for honouring them.

A delegate from the Indian Embassy, TP Seetharam said it was an honour for India to be among the awardees and he was particularly happy the awards went to the developers of a medical treatment that helped people in developing countries.

The Prince Mahidol Award was established on January 1, 1992, to commemorate the birth centenary of His Royal Highness Prince Mahidol.

Premyuda Boonroj

The Nation