Health organizations from around the world joined forces on the first-ever World Pneumonia Day to urge governments to take steps to fight the disease, the world’s leading killer of young children.
The Global Coalition against Child Pneumonia, made up of nearly 100 influential global health organizations, is advocating for the United Nations to recognize 2 November as World Pneumonia Day.
Pneumonia is an acute lower respiratory infection and inflammation of the lungs that makes it difficult to breathe. Symptoms include coughing, rapid or difficulty breathing, fever, loss of appetite, etc. A child can die if pneumonia is left untreated or treated too late.
Pneumonia takes the lives of two million children each year, contributing to the deaths of more children under-five than measles, malaria, and AIDS combined. One child dies from pneumonia every 15 seconds, the disease accounting for 20% of all deaths of children under-five worldwide. Every year, some 150 million children develop the disease and 11 million are hospitalised. Almost all of these children live in developing countries.
Yet, despite its overwhelming death toll, pneumonia is underfunded and rarely mentioned in the media.
More than one million of these young lives could be saved by making affordable health measures such as breastfeeding, vaccines and antibiotics more accessible to the poorest children and by bringing health care closer to children’s homes. Pneumonia can be treated with a course of low-cost antibiotics (cotrimoxazole or amoxicillin) over three to five days.
The Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia (GAPP) released by the WHO and UNICEF today, outlines a six-year plan for the worldwide scale-up of a comprehensive set of interventions to control the disease.
As a member of The Global Coalition against Child Pneumonia, Save the Children is actively involved in promoting the prevention and treatment of pneumonia. This year Save the Children launched the Newborn and Child Survival Campaign, a large scale international health initiative which aims to contribute to the achievement of Millennium Development Goal 4, to reduce by two-thirds the mortality rate of children under-five by 2015. Pneumonia poses one of the biggest threats to child health and is one of the major blocks to achieving this goal.
“Pneumonia can be prevented with simple interventions, and treated with low-cost, low-tech medications and care”, said Mary Beth Powers, Vice Chair of Save the Children’s Every One campaign. “The involvement of the Global Coalition against Child Pneumonia and Save the Children’s global campaign in newborn and child survival, are important in helping to reduce the numbers of children dying needlessly from pneumonia.”
Save the Children hopes that the establishment of World Pneumonia Day will drive people to attach greater importance to the disease and stimulate individual involvement in the fight against pneumonia.
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