Richard A. Cash

Who is Richard A. Cash?

Richard Alan Cash, M.D., M.P.H. is an American global health researcher, public health physician, internist, and Prince Mahidol Award / Medal winner. He is a Senior Lecturer in International Health and Director of the Program on Ethical Issues in International Health in the Department of Global Health & Population of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. Prior to joining HSPH full-time, he was a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development and part-time at HSPH. He is gifted at figuring out how to show others how to do much with very little.

Cash began his international career over 40 years ago when he was assigned by NIAID of the NIH to the Pakistan-SEATO Cholera Research Laboratory in Dhaka, East Pakistan. While there, he and his colleagues developed and conducted the first clinical trials of oral rehydration therapy in adult and pediatric cholera patients and patients with other infectious causes of diarrhea. This technology matches the volume of fluid losses from dehydration patients with the volume they consume so that the fluid replacement packets greatly reduce or completely replace IV therapy, which was then the only current treatment for cholera. Discoveries in ORT have been estimated to have saved over 50 million lives worldwide. World Health Organization estimates are that at least 60 million children have been spared painful deaths because of ORT. They also conducted the first field trials of ORT, the first community-based trials of ORT, and the first use of amino acids as an additional substrate. In the late 1970s, Cash worked with BRAC on their OTEP, which taught over 13 million mothers and caregivers how to prepare and use ORT in the home using the "pinch and scoop" method.