Respiratory Infections News

The pediatric population is one that relies primarily on adults for health advocacy and care, and as such, their protection and medical treatment is an ethical as well as a scientific mandate. Yet despite global improvements in research and disease control, the risk, burden and mortality associated with pediatric infectious diseases remain considerable. “Diseases of poverty,” such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS, continue to take a toll on children in the world’s poorest countries.

The pediatric population is one that relies primarily on adults for health advocacy and care, and as such, their protection and medical treatment is an ethical as well as a scientific mandate. Yet despite global improvements in research and disease control, the risk, burden and mortality associated with pediatric infectious diseases remain considerable. “Diseases of poverty,” such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS, continue to take a toll on children in the world’s poorest countries.

Diphtheria is a vaccine-preventable disease affecting mainly children. The primary immunization of three doses of the diphtheria toxoid in infancy is routine throughout the world, except where it isn’t. With proper childhood immunization and boosters, there should be little or no diphtheria. Although it is possible for immunized people to develop diphtheria, the disease is much less severe. In the unimmunized population, the mortality rate is 5% to 10%, and deaths occur mainly in the very young and the very old.

WHO published its first ever list of essential diagnostic tests today to address the prevalence of late or incorrect diagnoses and improve treatment outcomes globally.

Infectious Disease News has won two awards from the American Society of Healthcare Publication Editors, which recognizes outstanding editorial and design excellence and achievements in health care publications.

Air pollution causes 7 million deaths worldwide each year — mostly through noncommunicable diseases like lung cancer, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease but also through acute respiratory infections like pneumonia, experts said.

NEW ORLEANS — When treating pneumonia in the hospital, physicians should be careful to avoid common mistakes, Joanna M. Bonsall, MD, PhD, from the division of hospital medicine at Emory University, said during her presentation at the ACP Internal Medicine Meeting.

People older than 60 years who took proton pump inhibitors long-term showed an increased risk for developing pneumonia, according to new research published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

The global child mortality rate has declined 56% since 1990, but 15,000 children aged younger than 5 years still die every day, and young children in Africa are almost eight times likelier to die than those born in Europe, according to WHO.

ATLANTA — In this video from the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service conference, Victoria Hall, DVM, MS, EIS officer in the Minnesota Department of Health, discusses findings from an investigation into a fatal outbreak of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, or MDR-TB, in an ethnic Hmong community in Minnesota.