December 10, 2003

By: Sara Collin
Website: http://www.1st-in-vitamins.com

Dean Sommer Receives Warren Alpert Foundation Scientific Prize

Alfred Sommer, MD, MHS, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was honored today with the fifteenth annual Warren Alpert Foundation Scientific Prize for his pioneering work that showed that four-cent vitamin A capsules can prevent the deaths of millions of lives and blindness in the developing world. The ceremony to bestow the $150,000 prize was held at Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel.

In the early 1980s, Dr. Sommer, an ophthalmologist and epidemiologist by training, was searching for ways to prevent xerophthalmia, or childhood blindness, in Indonesian children. While treating children with capsules of vitamin A - vitamin A deficiency was a known cause of the disease - Dr. Sommer recognized a startling trend: children in the trial who received Vitamin A, in addition to retaining their vision, were dying at much lower rates than children who were receiving a placebo.

Dr. Sommer went on to replicate this work in Nepal and Africa, proving the trend in different countries and showing that even mild vitamin A deficiency dramatically increases childhood mortality rates, primarily because this deficiency reduces resistance to infectious diseases such as measles and diarrhea.

Moving from science to practice, Dr. Sommer next showed that the debilitating consequences of vitamin A deficiency could be effectively, quickly, and cheaply treated with oral high-dose vitamin A supplementation. In 1995, a United Nations Children’s Fund report estimated that 1 million to 3 million lives could be saved annually if young children in the Third World took a vitamin A pill two or three times a year. The annual cost per child: 4 to 6 cents.

Also see: healing with herbs and vitamins.

About The Author:

Sara Collin is a successful author and regular contributor to http://www.1st-in-vitamins.com.  Recommending the best vitamins, minerals, herbs and weight loss products for optimum health.