Three million children and adolescents succumb to infectious diseases such as diarrhoea and pneumonia every year, translating into one death every 10 seconds, with India, Nigeria, and Pakistan sharing the highest disease burden, according to a new study published in The Lancet journal.
“Thus there is a need to focus on global infectious disease control measures from under 5 years old kids to young people between five and 24 years old,” said the study led by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Australia, and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, US.
Infectious diseases were found to have caused more than half of such deaths in low to middle-income countries, compared with 6 percent in high-income countries, said the study which looked across 204 countries between 1990 and 2019 from birth to 24 years of age. Diarrhoea, pneumonia, and malaria accounted for two-thirds of infectious diseases and death in this demographic, while HIV and tuberculosis were found to be the leading causes among older adolescents.
The shift in disease burden to older children and adolescents, the study said, was largely driven by the considerable infection control efforts targeting children under five years in low-income countries and slower progress made across the older age groups.
In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, and recent epidemics of Zika virus, Ebola, and severe acute respiratory syndrome, the research would have important implications for global policy, financing, resource allocation, and health systems, said Murdoch Children’s professor Peter Azzopardi.
He said it underscored the urgent need to take stock of infectious disease control. More adolescents than younger children have been affected by these emergent diseases, challenging the almost exclusive focus on younger children within existing infectious disease control, the study said.
“The findings highlight the need for health systems, particularly in low-income countries, to continue to build capacity and scale up trusted interventions like immunisation programmes.
“But there must also be an investment in broader approaches that address social barriers such as adolescent males with HIV having better access to health care,” said Azzopardi.
The Covid-19 pandemic rightly focussed global attention on infectious diseases, said Susan Sawyer, Murdoch Children’s professor. “This study reminds us of the importance of addressing the emerging, as well as the established, infectious diseases, especially in those aged 5-24 years who have too often been neglected by policy and programming,” she said.