Shocker! What kills a child every three minutes in Nigeria
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| Muhammadu Buhari, President, Nigeria |
More saddening is that their
deaths were preventable.
Their deaths were due to
pneumonia, and it’s more saddening still that it’s expected to kill more
children, two million more of them, unless efforts to fight it and other major
diseases are boosted.
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 – 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.
Researchers also found boosting
pneumonia services would create an additional ‘ripple effect’ preventing 1.2
million extra child deaths from other major childhood diseases at the same
time.
Interventions like improving
nutrition, increasing vaccine coverage or boosting breastfeeding rates – key
measures that reduce the risk of children dying from pneumonia – would also
stop thousands of child deaths from diseases like diarrhoea (580,000),
meningitis (68,000), measles (55,000) and malaria (4,000).
By 2030, that 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, researchers said.
Pneumonia is caused by bacteria,
viruses or fungi, and it leaves children fighting for breath as their lungs
fill with pus and fluid.
The disease is the leading killer
of children in Nigeria, causing 19 percent of under-five deaths.
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.
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