Bacteria kills 800 000 kids/year

2009-03-10 11:22

Johannesburg - Deadly bacteria causing pneumonia, meningitis and blood infections kill more than 800 000 children a year, with Africa most at risk, experts said on Tuesday.

The pneumococcal bacteria, which causes most invasive disease across the globe, is spread through person-to-person contact, and diseases such as meningitis ravage poor African communities.

"Over 800 000 children die of pneumococcal diseases every year. When children in Africa get pneumococcal meningitis, it disables many of them. Fifty percent of them who survive it have disabilities," Orin Levine, an expert from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in the United States told AFP.

Two new studies by medical experts in the field highlight the urgency of preventing the spread of pneumococcal diseases in Africa.

When pneumococcal bacteria attack the lungs, the result is pneumonia, which is the biggest killer of children under the age of five, resulting in more deaths than Aids, measles and malaria combined, Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele of the World Health Organisation said at the release of the reports.

About 1.6 million people across the globe die annually of pneumococcal disease, half of them children under the age of five, according to the studies released on Tuesday.

If the bacteria invade the brain, pneumococcal meningitis is caused, which leaves one in four children with serious disabilities, including cerebral palsy, epilepsy, brain damage, kidney disease, deafness, limb amputations and developmental delay, the experts said.

The preventable disease imposes an economic burden on African families, said Levine, a head of the Pneumococcal Awareness Council of Experts (Pace), a project of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, a US non-profit organisation.

"In a typical rural village in Africa, when a child is disabled, it brings a lot of economic cost to the family. Consequently, the disease has a big impact on Africa," Levine said.

There are over 90 types of pneumococcal diseases, which are most often treated with penicillin. The most common also include bacteremia, when the bacteria attack the bloodstream, as well as sinusitis and middle ear infection

- AFP