Yesterday, November 12th, was World Pneumonia Day. Save the Children joined with partners around the world to draw attention to childhood pneumonia and the need to expand global efforts in order to fight the biggest killer of children.
World Pneumonia Day is one of those days that usually slip quietly under the radar – but it shouldn’t.
The backdrop is a pandemic that kills adults by attacking their lungs with pneumonia. Medical oxygen treatment, one of the critical treatments for severe COVID-19 cases, is on the agenda. Unfortunately, childhood pneumonia isn’t, even though it claims over 800,000 lives every year – and despite the evidence that untreated pneumonia among malnourished children will drive an increase in child mortality.
In 2019, Save the Children made a commitment as an organisation to make childhood pneumonia a priority. We have achieved some extraordinary results. Our colleagues across nine countries have established a pneumonia community of practice that is influencing policy. We have launched a formal partnership with our friends at UNICEF. Working with the Every Breath Counts Coalition, we played a role in organizing and convening partners and governments for the first ever Global Forum on Childhood Pneumonia, which took place in January 2020. There have been some notable success stories. To give two examples, our staff shaped Nigeria’s first anti-pneumonia strategy, which was launched in Barcelona; and our team in Indonesia drove a change in vaccination policy that will give millions of children access to a life-saving PCV immunisation.
Despite this progress, there is still more work to do.
Each year, around 4.2 million children in low- and middle-income countries are admitted to health facilities suffering from pneumonia-related hypoxemia. In many of these countries, fewer than one in five children receive the oxygen therapy they need. For many, that is a death sentence.
The pandemic threatens to undermine further progress. Already fragile health systems are now growing weaker and critical health and nutrition services are being disrupted, worsening inequalities and further depriving the most vulnerable and marginalized children of critical services. As the world races to scale up oxygen supply, to save lives from both COVID-19 and pneumonia it must get to the hardest to reach, be free for everyone and be sustainable. If we focus only on short term fixes, we risk missing a pivotal opportunity to save millions of lives for generations to come.
Our commitment to children and tackling childhood pneumonia is now more important than ever.
