DHAKA, Bangladesh — On a humid afternoon outside the world’s largest diarrheal disease hospital in Bangladesh’s capital, a constant stream of patients is seeking urgent medical care. Some of the new arrivals rely on friends and family to carry them through the doors, while the most feeble are wheeled inside on stretchers by medical staff.

This doctor is turning shampoo bottles into "ventilators" and it's helping children survive pneumonia.

A doctor in Bangladesh has repurposed a plastic shampoo bottle to help save infants suffering from pneumonia. CNN's Kristie Lu Stout talks to Dr. Mohammod Chisti about his life-saving innovation.

Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs) were a facet of developed countries, but there has been a considerable shift (in lifestyles, diets etc) in the past 15-20 years in many low and middle income countries which now account for 80% of NCD-related deaths worldwide.

ON HIS first night as a trainee paediatrician in Sylhet, Bangladesh, Mohamad Chisti (pictured above) watched three children die of pneumonia.

Everyday 46 people drown - most of them children - but UN officials hope raising awareness will change that.

New attitudes are even more needed. In Dhaka’s slums it is often said that “women are flames and men are candles,” notes Ruchira Naved

In Dhaka, Bangladesh, two-month-old Sammiya flops lifelessly in her mother’s arms, her eyes glazed over. She is suffering from diarrhoea. This may not sound life-threatening – for most of us (in the West) diarrhoea is unpleasant, it might ruin a holiday or mean a few days off work at worst – but for many people across the world it is a killer.

FOR the feeding of babies, everyone agrees that “breast is best”. It is not, however, always convenient. Textile workers in Bangladesh, who are mostly women, are entitled to four months’ maternity leave.

While Bangladesh's textile trade has put money in women’s purses and challenged a patriarchal society to evolve, economic empowerment has not greatly improved gender equality and female wellbeing. On the contrary, women with jobs in the country’s largest industry are now imperiled on two fronts.

FOR adventurous travellers, it is merely an embarrassing nuisance. But among poor people diarrhoea is a killer. As many as half a million children are thought to die every year from enteric diseases, including cholera and dysentery. Repeated infections also weaken them, laying them open to attack from other killers such as pneumonia. Diarrhoea can even change a population’s appearance. One reason Indian children are shorter than sub-Saharan African children from families of similar means is that they fall sick more often.

The abating of enteric disease, together with the growing use of salty rehydration solutions to treat it, has spared many lives. In Matlab, a part of Bangladesh with good data, deaths from diarrhoea and dysentery have dropped by about 90% since the early 1990s.

Improved drinking water, sanitation and handwashing (WASH) interventions reduced child diarrhoea in rural Bangladesh, but contrary to expectations, did not impact child growth — indicates findings from new study by International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) and US collaborators.

Despite having the expertise to keep cholera in check, the world is losing the battle to contain the disease, especially in regions where conflict persists. Countries like Bangladesh, which have vast experience confronting cholera and other waterborne illnesses, can play a leading role.

Scanning the brain in its early years helps understand how negative experiences early in life affect the brain

In 1996, Dr Mohammod Jobayer Chisti was working in the paediatric department of the Sylhet Medical College Hospital in Bangladesh. That evening he made a promise that he would do something to stop children dying from pneumonia.

Some 40 million people — a quarter of the population — are exposed to arsenic-contaminated drinking water. Why are simple solutions not being applied?

Excessive and improper applications of insecticides and other agriculture chemicals in local fruit orchards may have triggered an outbreak of acute encephalitis syndrome (AES), a condition often associated with deadly inflammation of the brain, that killed 13 children in a rural Bangladesh community in 2012

An unprecedented study in Bangladesh could reveal how malnutrition, poor sanitation and other challenges make their mark on child development