Fred Ezeh, Abuja
The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), yesterday, raised the alarm that more Nigerian children risk dying from pneumonia if urgent steps were not taken to stop its spread.
UNICEF said at least a child dies in Nigeria every three minutes even as it predicted that pneumonia and other major diseases could get worse in the next 10 years if not addressed.
UNICEF Nigeria’s Country Representative, Peter Hawkins, in a statement in Abuja, said malnutrition, air pollution and lack of access to vaccines and antibiotics are the major factor marring efforts to prevent deaths from pneumonia.
Hawkins said about 809,000 deaths could be averted by significantly scaling up urgent services to prevent and treat pneumonia. He said interventions in nutrition, increased vaccine coverage and boost in breastfeeding rates would reduce the risk of children dying from pneumonia and stop thousands of child deaths from diarrhoea estimated at 580,000; meningitis,68,000; measles,55,000; and malaria,4,000.
Hawkins said more than 40 per cent of babies under one in Nigeria were unvaccinated, and three in four children suffering from pneumonia symptoms did not get access to medical treatment.
“We have a responsibility to do all we can to avert these deaths by pneumonia which are preventable. It will take concerted action by all players to achieve that,” he said.
He commended the Federal Government for coming up with the world’s first-ever pneumonia control strategy that was accompanied by real time measures to combat it.
“It’s a huge step forward. We now need to follow it up with concrete action on the ground to address the major causes and key drivers of childhood pneumonia deaths in this country,” he said.