From Moses Emorinken, Abuja

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said two million Nigerian children could die in the next decade unless more is done to fight pneumonia.

It also stated that malnutrition, air pollution and lack of access to vaccines and antibiotics are among the drivers of preventable deaths from pneumonia, which last year killed a child every three minutes in the country.

Pneumonia is caused by bacteria, viruses or fungi, and 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, according to a report by UNICEF.

“Forecasts show that 1.4 million children under the age of five could die from pneumonia over the next decade in Nigeria, on trends – the highest number of any country and more than 20 percent of childhood deaths from pneumonia globally.

However, an estimated 809,000 of these deaths would be averted by 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, which are 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 two million predicted under-five child deaths in Nigeria from all causes.

“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.

The modelling by Johns Hopkins University is being released today as nine leading health and children’s agencies host the world’s first global conference on childhood pneumonia in Barcelona”.

According to UNICEF Nigeria’s Country Representative, Peter Hawkins: “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 government of the world’s first-ever pneumonia control strategy – coupled with the focus globally on combating pneumonia – is a huge step forward.

We need to follow this with concrete action on the ground to address the causes and drivers of childhood pneumonia deaths in this country.”