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Zinc could cut infant deaths, study says Giving zinc
supplements to small and premature babies could cut their death rate by as
much as a third, according to researchers at John Hopkins University. The
zinc may boost the babies' immune systems, helping them fight off disease,
researchers said. Dr. Robert Black and Sunil Sazawal from Johns Hopkins
University in Maryland and colleagues at Annamalai University in India did
tests on 1,250 low birth-weight Indian children. The infants got either zinc
supplements, zinc with other vitamins and minerals, vitamins and minerals
without zinc, vitamins alone or a dummy pill. The babies
who got zinc, either alone or with other nutrients, were seen to be one-third
less likely to die, researchers reported to a meeting of the Federation of
American Scientists Experimental Biology (FASEB) in Washington. In a second
analysis, a Johns Hopkins team pooled the results from 17 international zinc
studies and found that adding zinc to the diet can reduce incidents of
diarrhea by up to 25 percent and pneumonia by 41 percent. |