Southampton researcher calls for urgent action to tackle pneumonia – the world’s number one infectious disease killer

Southampton researcher, Dr Michael Head, is calling for immediate action to tackle pneumonia after a new report named the condition as the leading infections disease killer in the world, claiming an estimated 2.6 million lives in 2017. Dr Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health in the Clinical Informatics Research Unit at the University of Southampton, is a major contributor to the report ‘The Missing Piece: why continued neglect of pneumonia threatens the achievement of health goals’ published to coincide with World Pneumonia Day (Monday, 12 November). Using the latest Global Burden of Disease (GBD) data, ‘The Missing Piece’ report places the responsibility for such a high death rate on the historically low priority given to pneumonia by national governments, and the relatively low levels of international development assistance and research and development (R&D) spending allocated to pneumonia-related activities. “Pneumonia is a disease that has not caught the public’s attention, despite the massive...