In the depressing world of epidemic disease it is those who shout loudest who get the most attention.

The highest profile diseases; AIDs, sub Saharan Africa’s biggest killer and malaria, which kills more than three million every year, get the lion’s share of the headlines and thus the lion’s share of the development aid budget.

But in the category for children under five year old neither compare with diarrhoea.

How much do you hear of this as a dangerous child killer though?

Maybe because it’s not quite seen as a ‘disease’ as such, but this non disease directly kills 1.6 million children every year, more than malaria and eight times as many as AIDS.

In 2008 around 60% of the world’s funding for research into major epidemics went to AIDS and malaria, only a tiny fraction to curing diarrhoea.

But this is a disease, unlike malaria and AIDS that are relatively intensive and expensive to treat, that can be treated relatively easily and cheaply.

Despite meagre funding resources researchers have discovered a new weapon in the fight for a cure, zinc.

Small programmes run by Save the Children in Mali are showing extraordinary results in halting the disease in its tracks.

A two week course of zinc tablets combined with more traditional oral rehydration treatments has cut deaths from the disease to virtually zero in every village it has been piloted in.

And a single treatment staves off symptoms for up to three months, enough to get through the dangerous rainy season, all of this for just 30p a treatment.
 
However, aid agencies still have a job on their hands to change perceptions of just how dangerous and how preventable this disease is.
 
After all where would a Diarrhoea Day sit on your list priorities when it comes to charitable giving.

But the message must be hammered home that this is an easily and inexpensively preventable condition that needlessly claims millions of lives. If we in the communications industry cannot actively help prevent the easily preventable through effective awareness raising, what use really is PR in the international development role?