Keep it on your radar: This Friday is World Pneumonia Day
Attention, everyone! This Friday is World Pneumonia Day. To help raise awareness for this worldwide movement against pneumonia — the number one killer of children in the developing world — we’ll be publishing blog posts and tweeting facts about this preventable illness throughout the week.
But first, the basics. Pneumonia is an infection that targets the lungs and fills them with liquid. It causes coughing and fever and can make breathing difficult. And worst of all, it can be deadly. In fact, it kills more children under the age of five than any other disease, claiming a young life every 20 seconds.
The disappointing part is that it’s completely avoidable. We have powerful vaccines and antibiotics to help fight pneumonia, but the problem is that they’re not reaching children in the poorest and most pneumonia-ridden countries in the world. Effective prevention and treatment of pneumonia, along with efforts to improve access to bed nets, micronutrients and treatments for infectious diseases, will allow us to make major strides toward achieving Millennium Development Goal 4 — reducing childhood mortality.
That’s why we’re taking World Pneumonia Day so seriously. It’s an opportunity to draw attention to an illness that unnecessarily claims millions of lives each year. Stay tuned to the ONE blog for more coverage around the event, and check out the World Pneumonia Day website to learn how you can get involved.
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November 8, 2010 at 9:53 pm
What good is a medication that can save your child’s life if it is unavailable or can’t be afforded? Treatments for malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and HIV/AIDS could save millions of lives each year, but they are out of reach for the poor. The pharmaceutical industry could lower their prices on small select groups of drugs that would save millions of lives and it would not appreciably affect their ability to fund research and development.
Drug companies have an obligation to deliver the medications that are needed in the developing countries of the world. Those areas have completely different needs than those that are prevalent in the West. Life saving medications should be available in bulk, at prices that aid organizations can afford. Making huge profits on non-essential items is one thing, but to constantly try to squeeze every penny of profit out of something that is necessary to sustain life is not right.
Each day people in extreme poverty die by the tens of thousands from curable illnesses and preventable diseases. The medications they so desperately need have been developed, but they can’t get them. That is inexcusable. If we are to live in a civilized world, people who need certain medications to stay alive should be provided with those drugs. There is no argument that can defend withholding life saving treatment from an innocent child who is dying simply because she was bitten by a mosquito.
http://stopextremepoverty.com/2010/11/08/the-pharmaceutical%c2%a0industry/