According to the World Health Organization (WHO) pneumonia kills 1.2 million children per year. Over a 20 year period that is 24 million people.
Adults and the elderly also regularly die from pneumonia, but mostly it strikes children.
Pneumonia is (for all age groups) one of the leading causes of death. 7% of all deaths is caused by pneumonia.
Even industrialized countries are not immune. In the USA pneumonia is the 8th leading cause of death.
The silly thing is that pneumonia is easily treatable with antibiotics or vaccination.
The vaccine, which creates an immunity to the most common virus and bacterial forms of pneumonia, is quite cheap. Costs less than $10 to have the vaccine.
In contrast if you get sick the cost of getting the antibiotics from a pharmacy sets you back $31 and change (like it did me yesterday). My conclusion? Vaccination is cheaper and pneumonia knocked me off my feet for 5 days, causing a loss in income for those days.
The silly thing is that because pneumonia feels like the common cold most people don't think of it as being deadly - because they don't take it seriously.
But when you realize that 7% of all deaths is caused by pneumonia then you start to realize this is a largely preventable death.
In 2012 pneumonia killed approx. 175,000 Americans.
(2.5 million Americans died in 2012 from a variety of causes, many of which are preventable through exercise and diet.)
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