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[1]A team from the University of Virginia followed hundreds of children in a Brazilian shanty town for 14 years. Those afflicted by diarrhoea showed signs of stunted mental development by the age of 10.The findings were announced at a meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. It is well-known that frequent diarrhoea affects growth and physical fitness - but the link with mental performance is not so established.
"And the best single predictor of how a child is doing in the third grade in school is how much diarrhoea they had during their first two years of life [2]."