World Pneumonia Day 2015

World Pneumonia Day (November 12) provides an annual forum for the world to stand together and demand action in the fight against pneumonia.

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 young lives than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. Yet most people are unaware of pneumonia’s overwhelming death toll.

Because of this 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.

In spite of the massive death toll of this disease, affordable treatment and prevention options exist.[3] 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.

A course of antibiotics which costs less than $1(US) is capable of curing the disease if it is started early enough.

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.