Pneumonia — no child should die from a disease we can prevent

Our World in Data presents the empirical evidence on global development in entries dedicated to specific topics.

This blog post draws on data and research discussed in our entries on Pneumonia and Child Mortality.

Every 39 seconds a child dies from pneumonia.¹ By the time you finish reading this post at least five children will have died from it. For a disease we know how to treat and prevent, this should never be the case.

Pneumonia is the leading cause of child mortality

5.4 million children under five years old died in 2017. Pneumonia was the cause of death of one-in-seven of them.² As the visualization shows, pneumonia is the leading cause of child mortality globally and has been the leading cause for the past three decades.

Today more than 2000 children will die from pneumonia

809,000 children under five years old died from pneumonia in 2017. This means, on average, the disease claimed more than 2,200 children every day.³

As the map shows, children are most likely to die from pneumonia across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Just 5 countries — India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia – accounted for more than half of all deaths from childhood pneumonia in 2017.

In a 2018 comment in the journal Lancet, Kevin Watkins and Devi Sridhar called pneumonia “the ultimate disease of poverty”.⁴ There is a strong correlation between a country’s income and child mortality from pneumonia. Pneumonia is not a disease that transmits easily across borders; it is generally restricted to local communities and can be controlled when basic health measures are available. The disease is therefore most common in places where healthcare infrastructure is lacking and people are least able to afford treatment.⁵

In 1902 William Osler, one of the founders of Johns Hopkins Hospital and a pioneer medical teacher, referred to pneumonia as “Captain of the Men of Death”. In the early 20th century there were few treatments for pneumonia available; in the 1940s medical textbooks would still recommend bloodletting as one of them.⁹ Today we know the causes of the disease, what risk factors make children more likely to get the disease and we have multiple ways we can prevent and treat it. Many of the interventions we have today not only protect children from pneumonia but also help to limit diseases such as diarrhea, meningitis, tuberculosis, and others.

Pneumonia today is no longer a Captain — we know how to steer the course of the disease. But with all the tools we have at our disposal, there is still much work left to be done to save the 800,000 children lost each year due to this preventable disease.

Bernadeta Dadonaite (2019) - "Pneumonia — no child should die from a disease we can prevent". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://staging-owid.netlify.app/child-deaths-from-pneumonia' [Online Resource]

@article{owid-child-deaths-from-pneumonia,
    author = {Bernadeta Dadonaite},
    title = {Pneumonia — no child should die from a disease we can prevent},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2019},
    note = {https://staging-owid.netlify.app/child-deaths-from-pneumonia}
}

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