Alright readers, pop quiz: What is the leading cause of death for children under 5?

Without peeking select your answer on the poll below. Then click HERE for the correct answer.

Today in Lecce, Italy, several donors fulfilled their promise to commit $1.5 billion to fight pneumococcal disease, which includes pneumonia, and is one of the biggest killers of children in developing countries around the world. In 2007, Finance Ministers from Canada, Italy, Norway, Russia, and the UK, gathered in Rome with the GAVI Alliance, the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, and WHO and pledged to adopt an innovative mechanism to finance vaccines for pneumococcal disease called Advance Market Commitments. Today that pledge became reality.

Every year, pneumococcal disease kills 1.6 million people, more than a million of whom are under five years of age. Pneumonia, the most common form of pneumococcal disease kills one in four children in developing countries, making it the primary cause of death among young children. A vaccine for these diseases could save millions of lives over the coming years.

A vaccine for pneumococcal disease has existed since 2000, and is already part of routine vaccinations for children in developed countries. However, there is not an affordable vaccine for developing countries. The AMC frontloads financing for the vaccine so that once it is available, it will cost developing countries $3.50 per dose instead of the $70 per dose it costs in developed countries. Over the past two years, the donors involved in the AMC have been working to finalize the legal, financial, and regulatory components of the project. Today, the AMC became fully operational.

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and panel member at the launch of ONE’s DATA Report yesterday, said “This innovative new model will mean faster access to vaccines for millions of children in poor countries. It’s a great example of how innovation and technology together can produce life-saving advances and make them available to people who need them around the world”.
For more information, read the press release from GAVI Alliance.

-Lisa Fleisher

Last month, to celebrate World Health Day, a group of organizations and activists launched an effort to encourage the United Nations to declare November 2nd as World Pneumonia Day. Pneumonia which is the leading killer of children around the world taking upwards of 2 million lives of children under 5 every year is rarely discussed in the media as a childhood killer and is often thought of only as a disease of the elderly. In communities around the world, it is often unrecognized and untreated – and simple cases become more severe and more costly to treat. Save the Children Artist Ambassador, Hugh Laurie, commented, “I work on a TV show that features the unusual, the bizarre, the unique. But the cases on House are brightly-colored minnows compared to the leviathan of pneumonia. It’s so big, you couldn’t make a TV show about it. But you could change it. So could I. We can and must change it.”

There is good news on pneumonia on both the prevention and treatment fronts. The advent of new and not so new vaccines being increasingly integrated into immunization programs around the world is critical. GAVI is at the forefront of promoting the integration of these newer vaccines which are effective against two of the leading causes of pneumonia. And, on the treatment side, the increasing recognition of community health workers as a key component of the strategy to more quickly diagnose and provide antibiotic treatment for cases of pneumonia when they do occur is vital to reducing pneumonia deaths. These prevention and treatment efforts have the potential to dramatically cut pneumonia deaths around the
world.

If you want to see the devastating effect of pneumonia on a young child and the simple solution, you can click on the link below to see the story of Karunesh, an Ethiopian infant, lucky enough to have a dedicated and trained community health worker near her village. And Karunesh’s story is just one of thousands of children’s whose lives are being saved thanks to simple diagnosis and treatment protocols that are being integrated into the training of community health workers in numerous countries around the world.

Finally, the coalition of pneumonia fighters has some new allies – Hedgefunds against Malaria has now become Hedgefunds against Malaria and Pneumonia and they are educating their membership and friends about the toll of these diseases.

More information about pneumonia and the work of organizations trying to stop it dead in its tracks is available at www.worldpneumoniaday.org

-Mary Beth Powers, Survive to 5 Campaign Chief, Save the Children USA

Nicholas Kristof advocated for more attention and funding for effective programs to combat pneumonia in the developing world in his Mother’s Day-themed New York Times Op-Ed yesterday.

Some excerpts below, the full piece here.

On this Mother’s Day, let’s not only reach for flowers and dinners but also think of how we might make motherhood itself a bit happier.

One answer would be to confront the disease that kills more children than any other around the world. Quick, what do you think that might be? Hint: It’s not diarrheal disease (the No. 2 killer), malaria, measles or AIDS…

Many Americans doubt whether foreign aid is effective, and it’s true that helping people is harder than it looks. Yet health programs have a particularly strong record (as do education and business-related initiatives like microfinance). One result of health campaigns is that the number of children dying by their fifth birthday has been cut in half since 1960, from 20 million annually to less than 10 million.

Children with AIDS and malaria already have advocates, so anyone looking for a cause should grab pneumonia and run with it. Think of it not as a grim and depressing initiative, but as potentially a happy turnaround opportunity, for these kids’ lives can be so breathtakingly easy to save.

-Virginia Simmons