Dilip Mahalanabis

Dilip Mahalanabis was an Indian pediatrician and medical researcher who, during the 1971 refugee crisis on the border with what became Bangladesh, ran a clinical study demonstrating that a simple oral rehydration solution could treat the severe dehydration caused by cholera, at a time when intravenous treatment was impractical for the scale of the outbreak. His research findings helped establish oral rehydration therapy as a global public health tool credited with saving millions of lives from diarrheal disease.