GiveVaccines.org wishes you a Happy and, most importantly Healthy, World Pneumonia Day. Today, we help raise awareness to fight pneumonia, a disease taking the lives of two million children each year. With increased awareness and aid, these deaths can be avoided. GiveVaccines.org is teaming up with WorldPneumoniaDay.org by donating all proceeds from November 1 thru November 30, 2009. Each time you log on to GiveVaccines.org and take part in our interactive vocabulary quiz game, you too will help fight the spread of pneumonia around the world.
GiveVaccines.org is a non-profit organization whose ultimate goal is to help prevent the spread of disease in the neediest areas of the world while providing an enjoyable tool for participants to improve their English vocabulary and medical terminology. All net proceeds from advertising revenues are donated to GaviAlliance.org and other affiliated organizations for the purchase of life-saving vaccines. Through support from the GAVI Alliance, low-income countries can access pneumonia vaccines for as little as $0.15 per dose., which equates to 150 accumulative correct answers on GiveVaccines.org. To play this interactive learning quiz, go to www.GiveVaccines.org
To commemorate the World Pneumonia Day, GiveVaccines.org has created a special category with regards to pneumonia. For this category, and each of the other categories, you will find 10 levels of difficulty. GiveVaccines.org will automatically adjust to words of varying levels of difficulty based on your performance. So, challenge yourself and your friends to see what level you can achieve. Visit GiveVaccines.org and help join the cause!
Child advocates from around the world are gathering in New York City to hear the latest on how we can raise the profile of child pneumonia and get policymakers everywhere to act.
Speakers include:
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to the United Nations’ Secretary-General
Singer-songwriter and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Angélique Kidjo
ABC News’ senior health and medical editor Dr. Richard Besser
WHO and UNICEF present a new report, the Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia, which provides a road map for preventing and treat child pneumonia in the world’s poorest countries.
And leading global health experts, philanthropists, faith-based leaders, corporate representatives and child advocates to begin to change the way the world responds to the #1 killer of children—pneumonia.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to give kids worldwide a fighting chance against pneumonia. Go to www.missionpneumonia.org, and play Save the Children’s new game. Find out about childhood pneumonia and how Save the Children works to help parents and community health workers overcome obstacles to treating a child whose life hangs in the balance.
On November 2, 2009, Save the Children is joining with other groups worldwide to bring attention to the terrible toll that pneumonia takes in developing countries. A child dies of pneumonia every 15 seconds. That comes to about 2 million lives lost each year. But, with your help, more than 1 million lives could be saved by making affordable health measures available – including vaccines, and antibiotics – and by bringing health care closer to children’s homes. That’s just what Save the Children is doing every day to save children’s lives in 40 countries.
Now we’re enlisting you to help us prevent pneumonia from striking susceptible children and protecting their lives when it does. Here’s how:
Play the game at www.missionpneumonia.org Learn what it takes to fight pneumonia around the world by taking our quiz.
Sign the petition. Show your elected officials that you support expanding the reach of life-saving tools – vaccines, antibiotics and trained health workers – to more mothers and babies in poor countries.
Pneumonia is the #1 killer of children under age 5, taking more lives than malaria, AIDS and measles combined. By accepting this mission, you can help keep kids healthy.
This morning I posted an article by Dr. Orin Levine about World Pneumonia Day that appeared in Global Health Magazine and wouldn’t you know it, now we have this great contribution to the ONE Blog from him! -Chris
What do Hugh Laurie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Senator Bill Frist, and Grammy winner Angélique Kidjo have in common? They are all lending their voices to the growing call to stop child pneumonia. Health leaders from across the globe— Rwandan Health Minister Richard Sezibera, Samir Saha from Bangladesh and Lulu Bravo from the Philippines, to name a few—are commemorating the first ever World Pneumonia Day today. Year after year, this leading killer of children has gone unrecognized, but like me, these advocates believe we can put an end to this disease. Stand with us and say: Pneumonia no more.
The goal of World Pneumonia Day is simple: to stand up for the children who lose their lives to this preventable, treatable disease. Every 15 seconds a child is killed by pneumonia. But we can stop the clock and save millions if vaccines, antibiotics and protective measures like breastfeeding are universally implemented.
Sounding the call to action in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is Michel Nyembwe, who organized a televised football match to bring attention to the disease; in Nigeria, Adegoke Falade is speaking on the radio about pneumonia. In India, a Great Pneumonia March is turning thousands of heads in rural Uttar Pradesh, and a mass media campaign is hitting Pakistan TV. In the United States, advocates from health, development, government and business communities will meet in New York City for a summit dedicated to global pneumonia control.
Want to join in the action and stand up against pneumonia? Check out this handy map to see what events are taking place in your country. But no matter where you are, showing your support for World Pneumonia is simple. Just put on a pair of your favorite blue jeans and tell your friends about pneumonia, the most solvable problem in global health.
As you might know, World Pneumonia Day is Monday, November 2nd. At the start of the week we ran a small, unscientific poll asking people what they thought to be the number one killer of children under 5. Not surprisingly, just a fraction of readers answered correctly– pneumonia.
In anticipation of Monday, Dr. Orin Levine writes in Global Health Magazine about this perception problem. According to Dr. Levine, “unlike HIV and malaria, pneumonia has yet to inspire substantial donor support or grassroots activism” with a possible explanation being “pneumonia’s familiar yet unthreatening image in the developed world.”
You can read Dr. Levine’s full piece here, and read more about our World Pneumonia Day series here.
Thank you to everyone who took ONE’s pop quiz. On Monday, we asked readers to identify the leading cause of death for children under five – and the results were very interesting.
While it garnered just about 11 percent of votes, pneumonia is in fact the leading killer of children. Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs which is caused by many organisms, but globally, bacteria such as Hib and pneumococcus are estimated to cause more than half of all childhood pneumonia deaths. Every year, 2 million children under five years of age are killed by the disease (more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined), even though we have the tools we need to prevent and treat it, including immunizations and antibiotics.
On our quiz, the most popular choice with 59 percent of votes was diarrhea, the second leading cause of death for children under five. Below, in descending order, are the top causes of death for children under five and the accompanying percentage of votes each received:
Pneumonia (11%)
Diarrhea (59%)
Malaria (22%)
Measles (3%)
HIV/AIDS (6%)
If you found the results to be surprising, we thought you might. Despite its burden compared to other diseases, relatively little attention is given to pneumonia. ONE is part of the Global Coalition Against Pneumonia, a group of organizations that is trying to increase knowledge about the disease, and decrease the millions of avoidable childhood deaths. Together with fellow coalition members, ONE will observe the first-ever World Pneumonia Day on November 2nd. To learn more, visit www.worldpneumoniaday.org and continue to check out ONE’s blog for more posts about the disease.
Yesterday we posted a quiz asking: What is the leading cause of death for children under 5? A lot of you participated and the answers are really interesting. Remember to take the quiz below, and then click HERE for the correct answer. No peeking!
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