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Month: August 2017

Fighting a silent killer in the slums

 

By Vera van Rijn     Although the media frequently reports on African children dying from malaria or HIV, it is actually pneumonia that is the biggest killer in children under five. With nearly 1 million annual deaths, pneumonia kills more children than HIV, diarrhea and malaria combined. Pneumonia is called ‘the silent killer’ because even today little attention is paid to this disease. In 2015 I joined a research team in the slums of Kampala, Uganda, in search of a way to stop children from dying of this disease.

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