The Lancet Global Health: The disgraceful neglect of childhood pneumonia
Editorial Board

“…Why … is there so little cross-disciplinary global solidarity around childhood pneumonia? … [P]neumonia does not feature in WHO’s latest Global Programme of Work and … no major donor has made the cause their own. … In trying to explain the neglect, [Kevin Watkins and Devi Sridhar, authors of a recent commentary in The Lancet,] point to the poverty-linked nature of pneumonia, in children particularly, and the fact that — unlike cholera, measles, or HIV — it is not easily transmitted across social boundaries into the constituencies with the most political influence. They call for all high-burden countries to adopt integrated pneumonia action plans framed around the [Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia and Diarrhoea (GAPPD)] and for a global summit on pneumonia. We concur. A child dying of pneumonia may be more difficult to imagine than one dying from inhaling visibly polluted air, but the solutions, in large part, are much closer at hand” (December 2018).