Rwanda Sees Gains Against Top Cause of Child Death: Pneumococcal Disease

Pneumococcal disease is one of the leading causes of death for children around the world, killing more than 800,000 children younger than 5 every year, according to the World Health Organization.

But the deadly illness, which can cause a range of infections including pneumonia and meningitis, gets far less attention in the developing world than other diseases affecting children such as malaria and HIV. The vaccines developed to prevent the disease are also not available to the general population in most poor countries.

“This is the biggest killer that nobody ever talks about,” said Orin Levine, executive director of the PneumoACTION project at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s only recently that we’ve been able to get the media and policy makers to begin paying attention to this disease.”

Rwanda is the prime example of that growing momentum — last year it became the first developing country to roll out a national pneumococcal vaccine campaign and is now being lauded for its progress against the disease.

Through the Rwandan government’s program, in partnership with international health organizations including the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, pneumococcal vaccine coverage for children in Rwanda has now reached 90 percent in just over a year.

Rwanda has achieved both a high level of prevention for pneumococcal disease through vaccination and good success with proactive treatment when cases do occur.

“In many ways Rwanda is a model of how to approach pneumococcal disease in the future, which is a comprehensive program,” Levine said.

World leaders are preparing to meet next Monday for the Millennium Development Goals Summit, where they will assess the progress on eight global development goals set for 2015, including reducing child mortality by two thirds.

Alex Palacios, GAVI’s special representative to the U.S and United Nations, hopes more attention will be paid to the roll pneumococcal disease and rotavirus, a main cause of diarrheal disease, play in achieving this goal at the summit.

“MDG 4 is not going to be met unless we focus on two particular diseases, pneumococcal disease and diarrheal disease….the two together represent almost 40 percent of the [death] toll for children,” he said.

“Rwanda is one of the relatively few countries that is succeeding in improving child health. It’s on track to reach MDG 4.”

By 2015, another 47 countries are planning to introduce pneumococcal vaccine programs and 41 will roll out the vaccine for rotavirus, he said.

This scale up is fueled by an advanced market commitment, negotiated in 2009 between pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer Inc., and international health actors including the World Bank, WHO, UNICEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Through the agreement, pneumococcal vaccines that currently cost about $70 per dose in developed countries will be available for $ 3.50 to developing countries.

“I really think that we are in an exciting time,” Levine said. “This is an indication of what can happen when we make child health a priority, work in partnerships, and put the funding behind it that is necessary.”

Follow the NewsHour’s Global Health unit on Twitter.

For the record, the Gates Foundation is an underwriter of NewsHour Global Health coverage.