Pneumonia is one of the leading causes of deaths in children under five years old despite being easily preventable and treatable. Although vaccines and other preventative efforts are decreasing the burden of the disease, much more work is still required. Those living in poor communities are at highest risk of pneumonia. Every child, regardless of where they are born, deserves access to lifesaving vaccines and medicines.

Established in 2009, World Pneumonia Day is marked every year on November 12th to:

    • Raise awareness about pneumonia, the world’s leading infectious killer of children under the age of 5

    • Promote interventions to protect against, prevent, and treat pneumonia and highlight proven approaches and solutions in need of additional resources and attention

    • Generate action, including continued donor investment, to combat pneumonia and other common, yet sometimes deadly, childhood diseases.

World Pneumonia Day has a three-pronged approach to protect, prevent, and treat.

    1. Protect: The protection against pneumonia starts right at birth with continued breastfeeding for at least the first six months of life. The child also should have good quality nutrition with adequate minerals and vitamins, which are essential for good immunity, and can fight the disease.

    2. Prevent: Vaccines can help in preventing the most severe forms of pneumonia, be it streptococcal, whooping cough, or measles. In addition, practices like regular handwashing, maintaining clean air and water are also essential to prevent pneumonia.

    3. Treat: Diagnosis at the right time followed by timely intervention with antibiotics and oxygen (if required) helps improve prognosis and speedy recovery. If the diagnosis is delayed, then treatment is complicated, and prognosis also worsens.

Certain Facts

    • Pneumonia is a preventable and treatable disease that sickens 155 million children under 5 and kills 1.6 million each year.

    • This makes pneumonia the number 1 killer of children under 5, claiming more lives in this age group than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined.

    • Due to unawareness, pneumonia has been overshadowed as a priority on the global health agenda, and rarely receives coverage in the news media.

    • World Pneumonia Day helps to bring this health crisis to the public’s attention and encourages policy makers and grassroots organizers alike to combat the disease.

    • There are effective vaccines against the two most common bacterial causes of deadly pneumonia, Haemophilus influenzae type B and Streptococcus pneumoniae, and most common viral cause of pneumonia, Orthomyxoviridae.

    • The Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia (GAPP) released by the WHO and UNICEF on World Pneumonia Day, 2009, finds that 1 million children's lives could be saved every year if prevention and treatment interventions for pneumonia were widely introduced in the world's poorest countries.

What is Pneumonia?

The lungs are made of multiple, elastic air sacs, and pneumonia is an infectious lung disease where these air sacs are inflamed leading to the reduced functionality of the lungs. The causes of pneumonia are:

    • Infection by either bacteria, virus, fungus, or parasites is the most common cause of pneumonia. The air sacs fill up with fluid or pus, leading to cough, difficulty in breathing, chest pain worsening with each breath, and high fever and shaking chills. 

    • The infection spreads mainly by being in close proximity to the infected person – by cough droplets with sneezing or coughing.

While most adults get cured with antibiotics, in infants, the elderly (over 65 years), and immunocompromised people, this disease can be life-threatening.  

(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants. The views expressed here are personal.)