Here’s some bad news: pneumonia kills many kids and adults. Here’s some worse news: everyone, including you, can get pneumonia, as long as you have lungs. Here’s even more bad news: pneumonia could become a bigger problem in the future. OK, go back to the Facebook, Twitter, and other post-election social media fights, and have a nice day.
Well…actually, there is good news for pneumonia (not for pneumonia, which would be bad, but for you about pneumonia). But, like the Star Wars movie series, you’ll have to learn about the bad before you learn the good.
In recognition of pneumonia being a major global health problem, World Pneumonia Day occurs every year on November 12. A coalition of organizations and advocates convened the first World Pneumonia Day in 2009 including the Global Health Council, the GAVI Alliance, the Sabin Vaccine Institute, Save The Children (including ambassadors Gwyneth Paltrow and Hugh Laurie), the Pneumococcal vaccines Accelerated Development and Introduction Plan (PneumoADIP), and Hedge Funds vs. Malaria & Pneumonia. Of course, World Pneumonia Day isn’t a “congratulations, pneumonia, on your impact, thank you for the memories” day. Rather, the goal was to raise awareness of the problem and bring together people to find better ways to handle, diagnose, and treat pneumonia.
Pneumonia affects people of all ages and income groups. As a recently released report from the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC) describes, pneumonia is one of the top 5 causes of death worldwide among children under 5 years of age, responsible for 16% of all deaths in this age group. Pneumonia interrupted the campaigns of two of the four major Presidential candidates this year, Hilary Clinton and Jill Stein. Younger celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence, and Kelly Osbourne have gotten pneumonia. Some have even died such as Brittany Murphy and Corey Haim. Many wealthy people (including Thurston Howell III or the actor who played him on Gilligan’s Island) have died from pneumonia. In the U.S., pneumonia is the second most common reason why adults get admitted to the hospital, next to giving birth (which usually occurs with women and not men). As the American Thoracic Society (ATS) describes, each year in the U.S., around 1 million adults get hospitalized with pneumonia with about 50,000 not surviving.
Pneumonia used to be a lot worse, but major medical and public health advances over the past half-century have made it a lot more preventable and treatable. Part of the progress has been figuring different causes of pneumonia, a general term for lung inflammation that can lead to a variety of problems such as fluid build-up, lung damage, severe breathing problems, and problems elsewhere in the body. As Maria Knoll, PhD, Associate Director of Science for IVAC and Associate Scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health explained, ”Not only do both bacteria and viruses cause pneumonia, there are a lot of different kinds of these organisms that are responsible for serious pneumonia hospitalizations globally. A current 7-country study, PERCH, is evaluating as many as 60 organisms to assess their role in causing pneumonia.” By the way, 60 is a lot.
Identifying the organisms that can cause pneumonia has led to better methods of preventing, diagnosing, and treating pneumonia. For example, before antibiotics, the probably of dying from pneumonia caused by bacteria used to be a lot higher. Also, as Knoll describes, now “several important vaccines exist that can prevent a few of the important causes of pneumonia. In addition to pneumococcal vaccine, this also includes influenzae type b (Hib) vaccine and the flu shot. Incidentally, the flu shot prevents ‘influenzae’, a virus, which is not that same as ‘H. influenzae’, a bacterium.”
[Source:-Forbes]
