Friday, November 11, 2011
William Schaffner, MD
Saturday, Nov. 12 is the Third Annual
World Pneumonia
Day. Again this year I urge you to consider the enormous impact of
pneumonia on children across the world and to take a few minutes out of your
day to help.
Consider just these few simple facts:
- Pneumonia is the leading killer of children under age 5 worldwide
- Pneumonia claims a young life every 20 seconds
- Pneumonia deaths can be greatly reduced by vaccination (Hib,
pneumococcal, influenza, and measles), more access to antibiotic treatments,
and supportive healthcare
World Pneumonia Day organizers have listed five things you can do to
support their efforts to save lives. You’ll find them on the left side of
the World Pneumonia
Day home page. Most of them don’t take very long. In this
technology and information age, simply making others aware of this problem can
have an impact. For the technology minded among us, think about how little time
it takes to add a post to your Facebook page or send a Tweet to make your
friends and followers more aware of the problem and ways to help. You can even
add a “Twibbon” to your Twitter or Facebook profile with
only a few easy steps.
As you think about protecting children in the developing world, where
limited resources are a major barrier, think about how we in the US sometimes
neglect to use the resources we have. Just last week, CDC reported that
not all eligible children are getting a supplemental dose of
PCV13. It is recommended at 15 through 59 months for children who
received PCV7 earlier. Children in this country are needlessly developing
serious pneumococcal disease caused by strains that could be prevented by PCV13
vaccination.
Our efforts fall even shorter in adults, which is why they account for
85 percent of all invasive pneumococcal disease in the US. We all need to do
our part every day—recommend vaccines to your patients, tell your
colleagues at every opportunity that vaccines are safe, effective and essential
tools for the health of individuals and our society.
Let’s all commit to doing our part both at home and abroad to help
protect children and adults from vaccine-preventable diseases.
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