KUALA LUMPUR – Beginning 2009, Nov 12 was marked as World Pneumonia Day by global child health advocates to draw attention to an often overlooked yet solvable and preventable global health problem.
Sadly, World Pneumonia Day does not receive as much recognition as, for example, World Heart Day or Pink October which is the breast cancer awareness month.
In Malaysia, pneumonia was the second leading cause of death in 2018, as stated in the Statistics on Cause of Death, Malaysia, Report issued by the Department of Statistics Malaysia in October last year. According to this report, the second principal causes of death in 2018 was pneumonia at 11.8% (the first was ischaemic heart diseases at 15.6%).
The same report also stated that pneumonia remained as the principal causes of death for females at 12.8% in 2018 compared with breast cancer (malignant breast neoplasms) at 4.4%.
Globally, pneumonia is the single biggest infectious killer of adults and children – claiming the lives of 2.5 million, including 672,000 children aged below five, in 2019, according to statistics by Stop Pneumonia which is an initiative to champion the fight against pneumonia by the International Vaccine Access Center at the United States-based Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Health experts, meanwhile, expect this year’s pneumonia death toll to be higher due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Datuk Dr Zainudin Md Zin, consultant physician in internal and respiratory medicine at KPJ Damansara Specialist Hospital, said the pandemic is expected to add 1.9 million to deaths caused by pneumonia worldwide.
“Hence, this year’s World Pneumonia Day is being observed in light of the unique challenges faced by not only Malaysia but the whole world in having to deal with an increase in Covid-19 deaths due to pneumonia,” he said in an interview here. – Bernama, November 11, 2020
