Pneumonia kills more young children than any other disease; the World Health Organisation says 1.8 million children under the age of five die from the preventable disease every year, with 98 percent of the deaths occurring in 68 developing countries. Until now, pneumonia has been a low priority and relatively few resources have been dedicated to tackling this disease but today sees the launch of an action plan to stop this child killer.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UN children's fund today launched a global appeal for funding for a six-year plan to prevent and treat pneumonia in 68 developing countries, most of them in Africa and Asia. UNICEF director Ann M Veneman says, "Pneumonia is the leading cause of under age five mortality, killing over 4,000 children every day."

According to the WHO, the global action plan for the prevention and control of pneumonia (GAPP) could save up to 5.3 million children from dying of pneumonia by 2015. GAPP aims to increase awareness of pneumonia as a major cause of child deaths and calls on global and national policymakers, as well as donor organisations and NGOs, to take immediate action to implement the plan.
 

WHO director Dr Margaret Chan says, "This action plan provides the strategy to prevent and control pneumonia, which today kills more children than any other illness," adding, "we know the strategy will work and if it's applied in every high burden country, we will be able to prevent millions of deaths."

Strategy
GAPP is a three-pronged approach: ensuring that every child is vaccinated against the main causes of pneumonia; preventing low birth weight and promoting breast-feeding and treating children who become ill with pneumonia with antibiotics. Children in wealthy nations are routinely vaccinated against the diseases that cause pneumonia but vaccination programmes in developing countries are underfunded and patchy at best.
 

According to UNICEF health adviser Anne Golaz numerous studies have proven that children who were exclusively breastfed during the first six months of life have a 23 percent lower chance of contracting pneumonia but "just one third of children in developing countries are breastfed exclusively for the first six months."

Millennium Development Goals
GAPP was launched to coincide with the first-ever Global Pneumonia Summit, currently underway in New York City. The programme will cost 26.4 billion euros to implement, which works out at just 8.73 euros per child. UNICEF and the WHO stressed the need to raise awareness about pneumonia and the need to get it under control to achieve the Millennium Development Goals on child mortality.
 

The WHO says that implementing GAPP will lead to a 65-percent reduction in child pneumonia deaths by 2015 as well as reducing the number of severe pneumonia cases by 25 percent.