17 Nov Ignored – the world’s leading killer of children
Posted at 17:19h
in News
In London today, a parliamentary committee is discussing a neglected disease. It’s called pneumonia and it kills 1.5 million children every year.
With that sort of death toll, experts and campaigners can’t understand why pneumonia is not top of the global health agenda. This is Orin Levine, executive director of the International Vaccines Access Centre (IVAC), of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:
“The serial frustration we have is that every year the WHO [World Health Organisation] puts out its disease burden and pneumonia is the leading killer of children, but it does not get anywhere near the attention and focus you would think the leading killer of children would get.”