Boosting efforts to fight pneumonia could avert over 2 million child deaths from the disease and other major diseases in Nigeria, a United Nation’s Children Fund (UNICEF) report reveals.
According to the report, malnutrition, air pollution and lack of access to vaccines and antibiotics which have been identified as the main drivers of preventable deaths from pneumonia has been prevalent in most parts of Nigeria.
Pneumonia is caused by bacteria, viruses or fungi, and leaves children fighting for breath as their lungs fill with pus and fluid.
“This disease is the leading killer of children in Nigeria, causing 19 percent of under-five deaths. Pneumonia in 2019 killed a child every three minutes in Nigeria,” the report said.
According to the report, forecasts show that 1.4 million children under the age of five could die from pneumonia over the next decade in Nigeria, on current trends representing the highest number of any country in the world and more than 20 percent of childhood deaths from pneumonia globally.
However, an estimated 809,000 of these deaths would be averted by significantly scaling up services to prevent and treat pneumonia.
“Interventions like improving nutrition, increasing vaccine coverage or boosting breastfeeding rates are therefore to be considered as key measures that could reverse the risk of children dying from pneumonia, as well as stop thousands of child deaths from diseases like diarrhea, meningitis, measles, and malaria,” Peter Hawkins, UNICEF Nigeria’s Country Representative, said in a statement.
“We have a responsibility to do all we can to avert these deaths by pneumonia, deaths that are nearly all preventable. It will take concerted action by all players”.
“The announcement by the Nigerian government of the world’s first-ever pneumonia control strategy coupled with the focus globally on combatting pneumonia is a huge step forward. We now need to follow this with concrete action on the ground to address the causes and drivers of childhood pneumonia deaths in this country.”
According to the report, the effect would be so large that pneumonia interventions alone would avert over 2 million predicted under-five child deaths in Nigeria from all causes combined by 2030.
“Most pneumonia deaths can be prevented with vaccines, and easily treated with low-cost antibiotics. But more than 40 percent of one-year-olds in Nigeria are unvaccinated, and three in four children suffering from pneumonia symptoms do not get access to medical treatment”.
