Acute respiratory infections
The disease burden for Acute Respiratory Infections (ARI) is estimated at 94 037 000 DALYs (WHO, 2002 ) and 3.9 million deaths (WHO, 2002 ). ARI are among the leading causes of death in children under 5 years but diagnosis and attribution are difficult and uncertain. A further complication is that community studies of childhood mortality depend largely on verbal autopsies, which can be very unreliable for the diagnosis of ARI. Another difficulty is that ARI are often associated with other life-threatening diseases such as measles. A study reports 62% of all deaths are attributable to ARI but most of these were associated with measles. When measles deaths are excluded the proportion falls to 24%. Better estimates of burden of childhood pneumonia are needed and should be given high priority. A recent meta-analysis study demonstrates that throughout the world 1.9 million (95% CI 1.6-2.2 million) children died from ARI in 2000, 70% of them in Africa and Southeast Asia. The proportion of deaths directly attributable to ARI declines from 23% to 18% and then 15% as under-5 mortality declines from 50 to 20 and then to 10/1000 per year. More
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Disease focal point
Dr Thomas Cherian
Coordinator ad-interim
Research on Parastics and Other Pathogens