Cough and pneumonia in the time of coronavirus

Pneumonia is the leading infectious cause of death globally, in children and adults. It kills more children each year than HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. Despite pneumonia’s global burden, the medical community is still unable to accurately and efficiently diagnose it. It remains perplexing why in this day and age — having mapped the human genome, contemplating colonizing Mars, and anticipating the development of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine — we cannot come up with better ways to diagnose pneumonia than counting breaths in children.

 In Hospitals, Pneumonia Is a Lethal Enemy

Pneumonia is the No. 1 hospital-acquired infection in America and hospitals aren’t doing enough to fight it. The best weapon: a toothbrush.

 It’s time to go back to basics in the fight against childhood pneumonia

It is critical to provide children with basic human needs like adequate nourishment, access to clean water and air, and equitable access to vaccines and basic healthcare. The costs associated with improving children’s living conditions must be evaluated against the high costs associated with the clinical management of childhood pneumonia. The residual burden of pneumonia can be reduced by prioritising child health through simple interventions. These include improving living conditions and accessibility to affordable medication, vaccines and care.

 Legionnaires' Disease: Why Is This Potentially Deadly Disease Seemingly On The Rise?

Well, you ain't imagining things. Legionnaires' Disease, which is a more severe form of legionellosis, has been like raw steak on a very slow flame. It is still very rare but seems to be becoming less rare over time.

Pneumonia Affects People of All Ages: Interview with Carlos J. Orihuela

Why is it important to continue research on pneumonia in people of all generations? The most obvious reason is because everyone matters. Worldwide respiratory tract infections are the leading cause of infectious death in children and the elderly; to focus pneumonia research on just one age group would be to ignore what is a major problem for the other.

A Vaccine Eliminated A Deadly Killer Of Infants. So Why Do Some People Fear It?

Prevnar, the vaccine against the pneumococcus bacterium, is one of the greatest pharmaceutical innovations of the past two decades. In children who are vaccinated, it eliminated most of the pneumonia and meningitis that bacteria causes. It proved so effective, in fact, that fewer pneumococcal infections occur in people over 65 who have never gotten the vaccine, because the germs are no longer circulating. It has, quite simply, changed the world for the better.

Every Breath Counts. A Breath of Fresh Air for Pneumonia

However, a breath of fresh air is now revitalising efforts to combat pneumonia in the form of a new international coalition bringing together more than 30 international institutions, including the ”la Caixa” Banking Foundation—one of the most important and coherent philanthropic actors in the field of pneumonia—and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (http://www.isglobal.org/en).

Hillary and Me: A Tale of Two Pneumonias

On Monday, my editors asked me to write about Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia, partially because I am, after all, a health writer (though my beat is global, not presidential), and partially because I too have pneumonia. I’m about two weeks ahead of her.

How to Know if You Have Pneumonia?

Bacteria are the top cause of pneumonia, but viruses cause about a fifth of the pneumonia cases. Fungi can also cause pneumonia, but this is very rare and typically in those with a very weak immune system (like in HIV or chemotherapy patients).

It’s Hard to Blog When You Have Pneumonia

I spent the last two days in the hospital with pneumonia. And let me tell you, it’s far from fun.

Partnering To Fight Pneumonia, The ‘Forgotten Killer’ Of Children

We have “eradication” targets for polio, “elimination” targets for malaria, and “generation-free” targets for HIV/AIDS, but for a disease that kills more children under five than all three combined, we have…well…very little.

Pneumonia - Africa’s silent killer

The last century has been witness to vast medical advancements that have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world. Yet recent figures show that in 2015 alone, nearly a million children died of pneumonia. It is both astounding and saddening that despite the availability of simple provisions that can both prevent and cure the disease, marginalised children are being denied access to the right drugs to save their lives.

Pneumonia Is A Very Serious Matter

I am not a physician nor do I play one on TV. But I have had “Walking Pneumonia” four times in my life – in 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1986. (Since that time a powerful pneumonia shot has been developed, generally good for ten years or so, and I have been blessed). But my point is that I know this ailment. It is not fatal nor does it have to be life threatening but it requires care. Walking pneumonia is very sinister and it creeps up on you with sore throats, coughing, then too much coughing.

Pneumonia vs. the Elderly

It makes them more vulnerable to other problems. Because of its rapid onset and ability to spread to other parts of the body (as opposed to a stroke or heart attack), pneumonia can be lethal. Even a milder case deals a severe blow to your immune system, which can turn an underlying condition like heart disease into a life-threatening malady.

Some Good News on Pneumonia

We discuss a fair number of grim topics hereabouts, so when I hear about good news, I figure I should grab it. So let me pass along two encouraging developments on the pneumonia front. First, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just issued new vaccination recommendations for older adults that should bolster their protection against this dangerous lung infection. Second, a large-scale study has found that when older Americans do land in hospitals with pneumonia, those hospitals are doing a measurably better job of treating them.

Stanford trained AI to diagnose pneumonia better than a radiologist in just two months

Now, a new paper from Stanford University shows just how fast a new dataset could be used to train artificial intelligence algorithms to the point of near-human accuracy. Using 100,000 x-ray images released by the National Institutes of Health on Sept. 27, the research published Nov. 14 (without peer review) on the website ArXiv claims its AI can detect pneumonia from x-rays with similar accuracy to four trained radiologists.

The Ominous Rattle Of Pneumonia

Last winter, my worst pneumonia case involved a school-aged girl whose mother is a very close friend of mine. First off, I would like to mention, she rarely calls me with medical questions; sometimes, I wish she would call me a little more often, especially that particular Sunday night.

What to Do for Pneumonia

Pneumonia can be divided into two very general types, community acquired and hospital acquired. The first is what will be more prevalent during a disaster—especially if many people are sheltering together.

Why I fight pneumonia

Mark Alderson won’t rest easy until he solves one of the biggest problems in global health: a vaccine against pneumonia.

Would I Have Died? Pneumonia

Pneumonia is a historically feared phenomenon. Around 1200, the medieval philosopher Maimonides described the basic symptoms of pneumonia as “acute fever, sticking (pleuritic) pain in the side, short rapid breaths, serrated pulse and cough.” Even after Louis Pasteur’s Germ Theory began to inform the treatment of bacterial diseases such as pneumonia in 1861, the illness continued in its infamy as treacherous. In 1918, William Osler proclaimed that pneumonia is “the captain of the men of death.”

You Wanted to Know: Walking Pneumonia

There are two types of pneumonia we talk about in medicine. The first is typical pneumonia or community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). This type generally affects young children and older adults and can make you very sick over a short period of time. The other type is atypical pneumonia, more commonly known as “walking pneumonia.” It gets this moniker because the symptoms are generally less severe than typical pneumonia, allowing those infected to continue “walking” around. Infection may seem more like a bad cold that never really seems to go away.

A new pneumococcal vaccine is here! Why this matters.

Each year, nearly 400,000 children under five years of age die globally from pneumococcal disease, mostly in Africa and Asia. WHO prequalification opens the door for this new vaccine, PNEUMOSIL®, to bolster the prevention toolkit and fulfill its purpose—to save more lives by enabling access that countries in these regions can afford and sustain long term.

Pneumonia cases linked to vaping are still rising. And federal officials don’t know what’s causing them

While the descriptions of the cases were remarkably similar, it is not currently clear why young vapers — the majority of cases are young men — are developing severe pneumonias.

Pneumonia: The Silent Killer

Pneumonia kills more children than any other infectious disease. Globally, close to 1 million under five children die from this preventable disease every year – the equivalent of more than 2,500 dying every day. That’s more than the death tolls of diarrhoea, malaria and HIV combined for this age group. Yet you will hear of no global campaign or cause to end pneumonia.

World Pneumonia Day – a decade on

In 2013, WHO and UNICEF released the Integrated Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia and Diarrhoea, which set a target of less than three child pneumonia deaths per 1,000 live births in every country by 2025.