Dear #CHOGM2018 leader,
You might be surprised to learn how vulnerable your nation’s children are to pneumonia.
It is the leading killer of children under 5, and despite some gains, deaths are not falling fast enough in your country.
If you don’t make faster progress on reducing child pneumonia deaths, you will not be able to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal for child mortality that you promised to achieve by 2030.
Take a look at the chart below.
See how your government is performing on the most critical tools currently available to protect children from pneumonia.
If more than 5% of your children are wasted, if less than 50% are exclusively breastfed, and if less than 80% are fully vaccinated with both the Hib and pneumococcal (PCV) vaccines, your children are vulnerable.
If less than 70% of parents in your country seek care when a child has pneumonia symptoms, and if your healthcare workers don’t routinely use diagnostic tools like pulse oximeters and respiratory rate timers, your children are vulnerable.
If your health workers don’t rationally dispense amoxicillin in child friendly form (i.e. dispersible tablets) and your hospitals don't provide oxygen safely and reliably, your children are vulnerable.
And if you don't know how your country is performing on these measures because there are so many data gaps, your children are vulnerable.
You need to close these gaps.
We encourage you to start by focusing on the areas where action can prevent the most child pneumonia deaths in the shortest space of time.
The Every Breath Counts Coalition is here to support governments to identify the most critical gaps and develop and implement strategies to close them, helping you fulfill your promise to children - to end preventable child deaths by 2030.
What could be more important.
The Every Breath Counts Coalition is an alliance of more than thirty governments, UN agencies, companies, NGOs, foundations and research institutions who are joining forces to support governments to accelerate child pneumonia mortality reductions to the levels required for the achievement of the health SDGs.
professor of paediatrics at University of Ibadan College of Medicine
7yThanks for showing us those tables. I could observe that the two countries with the highest absolute numbers of pneumonia deaths in under-5s in 2015 were India(180,000) and Nigeria (128,000). When I looked at the proportionate deaths(% child deaths due to pneumonia) calculated as total number of deaths/ population at risk, another picture emerged. Surprisingly, South Africa with free health programme in at least the Eastern Cape Province, had exactly the same percentage pneumonia deaths(17%) as Nigeria, where there is no free health. Examining data provided by the World Bank on population growth and economies of the Low Income and Lower-Middle Income Countries revealed that rate of population growth is inversely proportional to wealth [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=PK]. It appears to me that we should lay emphasis on population control as a surrogate for decreasing pneumonia mortality. Nigeria has one of the largest youth populations in the world; 44% aged less than 15 years [Nigeria Population 2015. Unpublished http://countrymeters.info/en/Nigeria(accessed 20 November 2015)]. High population is associated with high fertility consequent on high under-5 mortality rate[Global challenges facing humanity. http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/Global_Challenges/chall-03.html(accessed (20 November 2015)]. Increasing population will put immense pressure on dwindling natural resources, cause staggeringly high unemployment rate and could create instability[Global challenges facing humanity. http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/Global_Challenges/chall-03.html(accessed (20 November 2015)]. Reduction in under-5 mortality rate could reverse this trend, in that families will be encouraged to reduce fertility rate drastically when assured that probability of child survival is very high. So, in addition to using GAPPD score as the performance score card of each country, it will be supportive if we also impress on the Government the importance of arresting the impending population explosion in Africa. This may motivate and energize the Governments to commit a substantial part of the budget to financing pneumonia control programme, i.e., provision of pulse oximeters at every nook and corner of the health facilities coupled with access to comprehensive oxygen implementation.