Pneumonia Vaccines: Secret weapons in the war on poverty

This article originally appears in the VoICE Tool’s  March 2018 Featured Topics, found here.

Childhood pneumonia is arguably the most unfair affliction in the world. Not only is pneumonia the leading infectious cause of death in children less than 5 years of age – taking the lives of more than 100 children each hour, nearly a million per year – but it disproportionately affects those living in the poorest households and in the poorest countries around the world.

Poverty and pneumonia are closely linked

A description of the hardships associated with everyday life for children in poor households reads like a top ten list of risk factors for childhood pneumonia and pneumonia mortality. Common issues such as malnutrition, poor access to care, overcrowding, immune-compromising infections, low levels of parental education and more all contribute to the stark fact that a child born in the poorest fraction of society has many times the risk of pneumonia and death compared to a child born in the wealthiest fraction.

In this article, which originally appears as the Value of Immunization Compendium of Evidence (VoICE) March 2018 Featured Issue found here, the VoICE team looks at most important ways in which poverty-associated factors impact a child’s risk of pneumonia, and at the role of vaccines in mitigating poverty’s insidious effects.