Fighting for Breath Call to Action: End childhood pneumonia deaths

Pneumonia is the world’s leading infectious killer of children, claiming the lives of more than 800,000 children under the age of five every year, more than 2,000 every day.

It is a shocking demonstration of pervasive health inequities disproportionately affecting the most deprived and marginalised children in low- and middle-income countries. It represents a violation of children’s right to survival and development, as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet pneumonia has been largely forgotten on global and national health agendas. We can and must change this.

Almost all child pneumonia deaths are preventable. However, progress on reducing these deaths is slower than for most other major killers of children – and too slow to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ending preventable child deaths by 2030.