Coupling Diarrhea Treatment and Behavioral Change Communication to Reduce Severe Malnutrition among Children

Prior to matriculating at Marlboro College in Vermont, Noah Levinson spent two summers working at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitute in Kolkata, India. Although bathing, dressing, feeding and otherwise caring for the dying was a uniquely rich and spiritual experience, it was not enough for Noah. He could not shake the feeling that he could be doing more to prevent these conditions in the first place, helping to prolong and improve the lives of the living.

While walking to and from Mother Teresa’s each day, Noah passed and struck up friendships with some of the street children in one of the poorest slums in the city. He joked with them, kicked around a soccer ball and otherwise established lasting friendships. He learned from them, that their own greatest fear was not shortage of food or absence of shelter, but fear of getting sick or injured.

So, in 2001, a Jew and a Muslim, both inspired by a Christian, sought to address the problems of these primarily Hindu children. Noah and Sohrab Noshirvani, an Iranian American, organized a mobile health clinic for the street children. At age 19, Noah raised $30,000 by approaching friends and neighbors for generous contributions. He bought and refitted a used van, transformed it into a mobile health clinic and hired a local Indian doctor, nurse, driver and coordinator. That was the beginning of Calcutta Kids, an organization that now provides healthcare to thousands of poor children, pregnant women, and infants.

After getting Calcutta Kids off the ground and studying International Development at Marlboro College (because of Marlboro’s unique philosophy, Noah was able to spend about half of each college year in Kolkata), he did his undergraduate thesis on "India's Public Health Challenges: Historical Evolution and a Kolkata Case Study." Noah now recognized that the damage and health dangers being faced by these street kids was due in part to their low birth weights, the result of the poor nutritional status of their mothers. Even though India's development in recent years has been remarkable, the prevalence of low birth weight has been stagnant at 30% for the past quarter of a century. With the mobile health clinic in full operation, Calcutta Kids expanded its mission and began providing high quality counseling and antenatal care to pregnant women. This included, when necessary, providing women with full facility-based deliveries.

The results to date have been remarkable. The World Health Organization defines anything less than 2.5 kilograms (5.5 pounds) as “low birthweight.” The average birth weight in these slums prior to the program was under 2kg. Today nearly all the infants born into the Calcutta Kids program are born with weights above 2.5 kilograms.

In 2006, Noah commuted between Kolkata and Dhaka Bangladesh to study graduate level public health. Instead of doing his studies at a school of public health in the U.S. (concerned primarily with health problems in industrialized societies), Noah opted for the new James P. Grant/BRAC University School of Public Health in Bangladesh. Taught, in part, by faculty from Harvard and Columbia, this innovative program – a joint undertaking of those universities, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and BRAC and ICDDR,B(major non-governmental organizations in Bangladesh)-concentrates on health issues facing developing countries. While at BRAC University, Noah became interested in healthcare financing for the poor and wrote his Master’s thesis on micro health insurance.

Today, Calcutta Kids under the leadership of Noah, provides health services to needy pregnant women and children as well as facilitates low cost health insurance to thousands of other slum dwellers around Kolkata.