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Dr Nachiket Sule, CNS Correspondent, India During the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) period, the global under 5 mortality rate declined by more than half— from 90 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990 to 43 deaths per 1000 live births in 2015. India had an estimated 609,000 deaths among children under the age of 5 due to pneumonia and diarrhea in 2010, the highest amongst all the countries in the world. According to the recent WHO estimates of 2015 , 14.9% deaths of children under 5 years of age reported in India were attributable to pneumonia. Excluding the deaths in the neonatal age-group, WHO estimated that 28.4% deaths of children aged 1-59 months in India are due to pneumonia, which is the highest cause of death in this age-group. WHO and UNICEF have developed an integrated Global Action Plan for Pneumonia and Diarrhea (GAPPD ) to end preventable childhood deaths due to pneumonia and diarrhea by 2025. The plan focuses on a three pronged approach of Protect, Prevent and Treat. Ta...

Francis Okoye, CNS Correspondent, Nigeria Medical and historical evidence now abound, showing that the world cannot fight AIDS by ignoring TB. In 2015, the world recorded 10.4 million new TB cases of which people living with HIV (PLHIV) accounted for 1.2 million (11%) cases. There were an estimated 1.4 million TB deaths, with 400,000 deaths resulting from TB disease among PLHIV. The risk of developing TB is 26-31 times greater in PLHIV. Nearly 75% of PLHIV who contract TB live in sub-Saharan Africa. In some countries in this region, up to 80% of individuals with active TB disease are also HIV-positive. TB-HIV co-infection increasingly poses a risk to people living in other regions as well. Around 30% of all people who become sick with TB live in Asia, where TB accounts for 40% of AIDS related deaths. Eastern Europe too has the fastest-growing HIV epidemic globally, making this region vulnerable to increasing TB-HIV co-infection as well. In a webinar organized for the media by Citize...

Alice Sagwidza-Tembe, CNS Correspondent, Swaziland Coming back from the 47th Union World Conference on Lung Health held in Liverpool in October 2016, it is time to reflect upon the myriad advancements and debates to better the quality of care for people with TB—shortening the treatment schedule for multi drug resistant TB (MDR-TB), addressing the otherwise forgotten groups like adolescents, celebrities opening up about having lived with TB, and plenty more on fresh approaches to end the epidemic. An interesting, but not so new aspect crept into every discussion—the socio-economic issues that dampen efforts to stop TB and that begged the question: Are national TB programmes responsible for eradicating poverty to ensure effectiveness of the TB treatment therapy? Speaking with Dr Samson Haumba , the Country Director at the University Research Company in Swaziland, he expressed, “The socio-economic needs of the patient are critical to the intervention. However, the National TB programme b...