NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, November 21, 2014

There appears to be a disconnect between the global burden of pneumonia and how much money is spent on attempting to reduce this burden, which Humanosphere recently summed up as: Pneumonia leads in killing children, but not in global health financing.

In 2011, the latest year for which reliable spending estimates are available, development assistance for health that targeted pneumonia accounted for just 2 percent (or $663 million) of total funding for global health efforts. Yet pneumonia caused 5 percent of all years of life lost and 14 percent of child deaths (in 2013).

This (im)balancing act is noteworthy, as more funding to fight pneumonia would be expected to save thousands more lives.

But a question arises when you look at the overall disease trends for this killer over time: If so little was spent on pneumonia, how did the world achieve a nearly 60 percent decline in child pneumonia deaths between 1990 and 2013?