Blog #6: Pneumonia and Diarrhea of young children

Hi steemit friends:

In a previous article, I wrote about pneumonia. After learning more, I found a link between pneumonia and childhood diarrhea. So, Today I’d like to talk about Pneumonia and Diarrhea of young children

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Pneumonia and diarrhea, which often occur simultaneously, account for 29% of deaths among children under five worldwide - or more than 2 million a year. Nearly 90% of the children who die from the two diseases live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

In Viet Nam, mortality rates among children under five decreased dramatically from 51 per 1,000 births in 1990 to 23 per 1,000 births in 2010. However, Pneumonia and diarrhea remain the two main child killers, accounting for 12% and 10% of the under-5 deaths respectively in our country, according to a new UNICEF report.

There are two main causes of the problem.

• The first and clear cause is the polluted environment. As we know, source of water is seriously polluted by releasing garbage into river or lake, air severely affected by greenhouse gas caused by exhaust fumes from transport and industrial factory... all of this influence to the food and the air people use so bring dangerous risk to them and it's also have pneumonia and diarrhea.

• The second cause is the poor health infrastructure. This causes appearance most in developing country like Africa and Asia - where have poor economy. So it's the reason for incidence rate of pneumonia and diarrhea in developing country is much higher than developed country. Poor health infrastructure for example there are not enough patient beds, lack equipment, health facilities, shortage medicine especially in rural areas, also human resource is still poor in both quantity and quality.

As a whole, pneumonia and diarrhea have long been regarded as diseases of poverty and are closely associated with factors such as poor home environments, undernutrition and lack of access to essential services.

The prevention and treatments for both diseases often overlap and include such basic steps as encouraging breastfeeding and hand-washing with soap; expanding access to decent sanitation, and disseminating oral rehydration salts to children with diarrhea and antibiotics to children with bacterial pneumonia.
In addition, to solve two causes above we need a lot of time, money...

Especially, the implementation of these measures requires government commitment and action. Lots of things to do but we must complete the main solution suggest: Improve access to clean water and hygienic lavatories for children, encourage people to wear a mask when going outside to avoid with polluted air, perform environmental hygienic measure in public, enhance the quality and quantity of human resources in healthcare services. For example, open more training course to strengthen the quality and the number of health worker. Investing in improving health infrastructure to help people access easily to better healthcare services such as: increase the number of bed sick, provide medicines as well as equipment and so on.

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In conclusion, child deaths from pneumonia and diarrhea can be significantly reduced by tackling these problems and focusing efforts on the poorest communities. Through this, the tremendous progress in reducing the number of child deaths each year in the world can be accelerated, saving even more lives.

It is hoped that the information will help people to prevent and handle the risk factors in time. Thank you for reading. If you like this article and would like to write more articles on health topics, please comment!

Better use medicines at the outset than at the last moment!

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^{Refer to the previous post:}

^{1: Children eye injuries
2: Burn and prevention
3: Depression
4: Pneumonia in children
5: Effects of climate change on human health}

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