Lancet – Childhood Pneumonia and Diarrhea

Articles in this series can be downloaded at no charge, but registration is required:

Childhood Pneumonia and Diarrhea. Lancet, April 12, 2013

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Summary

The Lancet Series on Childhood Pneumonia and Diarrhoea, led by Aga Khan University, Pakistan, provides evidence for integrated control efforts for childhood pneumonia and diarrhoea. The first paper assesses the global burden of these two illnesses, comparing and contrasting them, and includes new estimates of severe disease and updated mortality estimates for 2011. Findings from the second paper show that a set of highly cost-effective interventions can prevent most diarrhoea deaths and nearly two thirds of pneumonia deaths by 2025, if delivered at scale. Furthermore, the paper estimates what the cost of scale up will be. The third paper presents the results of consultations with several hundred frontline workers in high-burden countries and explores the barriers and enablers they face in dealing with these two diseases and potential ways forward. The final paper represents a call to action and discusses the global and country-level remedies needed to eliminate preventable deaths from these illnesses by 2025. 

Papers
Global burden of childhood diarrhoea and pneumonia
Christa L Fischer Walker, Igor Rudan, Li Liu, Harish Nair, Evropi Theodoratou, Zulfiqar A Bhutta, Katherine L O’Brien, Harry Campbell, Robert E Black

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UNICEF – Community case management of diarrhea, malaria and pneumonia

Community case management of diarrhea, malaria and pneumonia: Tracking science to policy and practice in sub-Saharan Africa, 2012.

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UNICEF

Community case management (CCM) increases access to treatment to those beyond the reach of health facilities and has the potential to more equitably address the three largest causes of child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa: diarrhea, malaria and pneumonia.

Based on data from UNICEF country offices, we provide a profile of government policies and implementation of CCM diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria for sick children aged 2 months-5 years across sub-Saharan Africa in 2010. This offers an aggregated analysis and disaggregated tables for subSaharan Africa and where possible we explain the status of outliers based on correspondence with UNICEF country offices. We also compare our findings with previous data collected by Countdown 2015 to describe trends in CCM pneumonia policy and implementation for sub-Saharan Africa. The following bullet points represent key findings.

• The majority of governments in sub-Saharan Africa have policies supporting CCM of diarrhea, malaria or pneumonia, yet important exceptions remain. Moreover, even when supportive CCM policies exist, CCM programs are not always implemented, and far fewer are implemented at scale.
• Even as CCM pneumonia lags the furthest behind, significant change has occurred. The number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa with supportive CCM pneumonia policies has more than doubled since 2005.
  

WASHplus Weekly – World Pneumonia Day 2012

Issue 78 November  9, 2012 | Focus on World Pneumonia Day 2012

World Pneumonia Day 2012 is November 12. Pneumonia is a form of acute respiratory infection that affects the lungs. According to the World Health Organization, pneumonia is the single largest cause of death in children worldwide. Every year, it kills an estimated 1.4 million children under the age of five, accounting for 18 percent of all deaths of children under five years old worldwide. 

This issue of the WASHplus Weekly contains resources on environmental risk factors that increase a child’s susceptibility to pneumonia. These include: indoor air pollution caused by cooking and heating with biomass fuels (such as wood or dung); living in crowded homes; and parental smoking. Also included are recent resources on hand washing, ventilation, and other techniques to prevent pneumonia.

Pneumonia and diarrhoea: Tackling the deadliest diseases for the world’s poorest children

Pneumonia and diarrhoea: Tackling the deadliest diseases for the world’s poorest children, 2012.

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UNICEF

This report makes a remarkable and compelling argument for tackling two of the leading killers of children under age 5: pneumonia and diarrhoea. By 2015 more than 2 million child deaths could be averted if national coverage of costeffective interventions for pneumonia and diarrhoea were raised to the level of the richest 20 per cent in the highest mortality countries. This  is an achievable goal for many countries as they work towards more ambitious targets such as universal coverage.

Pneumonia and diarrhoea are leading killers of the world’s youngest children, accounting for 29 per cent of deaths among children under age 5  worldwide – or more than 2 million lives lost each year (figure 1). This toll is highly concentrated in the poorest regions and countries and among the
most disadvantaged children within these societies. Nearly 90 per cent of deaths due to pneumonia and diarrhoea occur in sub-Saharan Africa  and South Asia.