$29 bil­lion dol­lars is what the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion says it needs to fight pneu­mo­nia world­wide. Today is the first ever World Pneu­mo­nia Day, a dis­ease that kills more than malaria, AIDS and measles combined.

From this Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle that we found at the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle, writer Maria Cheng describes a new plan the U.N. has to fight pneumonia.

Today, the first World Pneu­mo­nia Day, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion and UNICEF are releas­ing a global plan attempt­ing to save more than 5 mil­lion chil­dren from dying of pneu­mo­nia by 2015.

The plea for money is less than what has been spent on more high-profile dis­eases such as AIDS, despite the fact pneu­mo­nia kills more chil­dren than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.

“This is very sim­ply the biggest killer peo­ple never hear about,” said Orin Levine, a pub­lic health expert at Johns Hop­kins Bloomberg School of Health, who has advised WHO and UNICEF. Pneu­mo­nia accounts for about 20 per­cent of all child deaths every year; AIDS causes about 2 percent.

The United Nations is pro­mot­ing a vari­ety of strate­gies from vac­ci­na­tion to gen­er­al­ized inter­ven­tions that address eco­nomic devel­op­ment. Pneu­mo­nia deaths are strongly linked to mal­nu­tri­tion and poverty.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/11/02/MNIP1ADMM7.DTL#ixzz0ViBFd9Nl

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