The Miracle Mineral

The first signs of illness in Suleiman Djarra appeared during a heavy rainstorm a few years ago. The 2-year-old suddenly stopped eating and then developed severe diarrhea, which continued for days, draining him of energy. On the third day, Suleiman's mother Aiseta Traoré carried his listless body to the road outside their village in southern Mali and hitchhiked to the nearest hospital, about 9 miles away. There, she says, a doctor gave her a pack of vitamins and advised her to take the boy home to recover. Hours after Traoré and Suleiman reached their village, though, the boy died.

Generations of Sogola residents have watched their children fall ill each rainy season, laid low by diarrhea, a disease that kills an astonishing 1.6 million children under 5 every year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

It is hard to grasp the impact diarrhea has on people's lives across Africa and Asia. The disease kills more children than either malaria or AIDS, stunts growth and forces millions--adults and children alike--to spend weeks at a time off work or school, which hits both a country's economy and its citizens' chances of a better future. In countless villages like Sogola, where people have long drawn water from unreliable wells, diarrhea kills so many that there is a general sense of resignation, as if watching children die is simply one of life's inevitable tragedies.

But now, thanks to a quiet revolution under way, young victims like Suleiman need not perish. Over the past few years, several aid organizations and governments--including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development--have begun distributing zinc supplements to villagers in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. A number of other groups are working with governments in Africa to introduce zinc, which comes both in tablet form and as a syrup. In Mali, Save the Children U.S. used $680,000 from a 2007 American Idol charity concert to distribute zinc tablets to a handful of villages in the south of the country.

So far, the small programs have drawn little attention. But their impact has been dramatic. Zinc pills appear to halt diarrhea in its tracks. In Sogola, the packets of tablets provided by Save the Children are kept in a rickety but locked wooden closet in a mud building--the closest thing the town has to a pharmacy. There, Moussa Traoré, 48--a thin, wan man--dispenses drugs with a studied seriousness. Since last year, he has prescribed 20 mg of zinc daily for about two weeks to children suffering from diarrhea. Throw in oral rehydration therapy (ORT), which has been the main weapon against diarrhea for the past few decades, and a treatment costs less than 30¢--affordable even to Sogola's desperately poor families.