PNEUMONIA having been a reason for the death of more than 12,000 children aged under five, which comes down to more than a child every hour, appears gravely worrying. The disease kills more than one in 10 children under five. In 2018, the disease, which is caused by bacteria, viruses or fungi leaving children fighting for breath, was responsible for more than 13 per cent of the children鈥檚 death. A survey report by Save the Children and the Johns Hopkins University also shows that more children under five died from pneumonia in 2018 in Bangladesh than any other diseases, making it a leading killer disease in the country. The disease causes lung tissue to swell and can cause fluid or pus in the lungs. The report, which said that more than 100,000 children under five could die from pneumonia over the next decade if the trends continued, that time also highlighted that more collaborative efforts to fight pneumonia could avert an estimated 140,000 child death from pneumonia and other diseases in a decade. And, an estimated 48,000 of the death could be averted by significantly scaling up services to prevent and treat pneumonia.
Bangladesh is reported its commitment to reaching the global target of reducing the phenomenon to three death from pneumonia per 1000 live births. A physician working with Dhaka Shishu Hospital echoes the commitment, noting that the plan was to reach the target by 2025. What remains worrying is that evidently, the target misses the deadline. The disease, which the Expanded Programme of Immunisation, launched in May 1974, covers with the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine introduced in March 2015, could be prevented, in addition to the vaccine, and treated with low-cost antibiotics if the disease is properly diagnosed. A severe case of pneumonia in children might require oxygen treatment, which is not readily available in hospitals, especially in outlying areas. The physician at Dhaka Shishu Hospital says that most of the death from pneumonia in a development and emergency context could be averted with a high coverage of pneumonia vaccines, timely treatment of the diseases at the community level and appropriate infant and young children feeding. This suggests that there could be inadequacy in the coverage and planning to prevent death from pneumonia. The physician also says that the health managers have plans to develop a national pneumonia prevention and control strategy to ensure quality, equitable access to primary health care, contributing towards achieving the universal health coverage.
The government should, in such a situation, effectively mind inadequacy in plans to control pneumonia in children and work out a national strategy to prevent the death of children from pneumonia.
