Not fewer than 156 million new cases of pneumonia are recorded yearly while 1.6 to 2 million have fatal outcome accounting for 18 percent of the total 8.8 million under 5 mortality globally.

A University don and pediatrics in the child health department of the University of Ilorin, Kwara State ,Prof. AbdulWahab Johnson, who disclosed this, lamented that Africa alone bears about 30 to 50% of the global death from pneumonia.

Prof. Johnson made this disclosure while delivering his inaugural lecture titiled "Microbes and the Bellows of young fellows: Towards proscribing a pernicious Parley", at the university auditorium.

He said "The more depressing aspect of the statistics is the 50 percent pneumonia related deaths occurring in five countries in Africa and Asia where disproportionately high under 5 deaths are recorded yearly".

Johnson noted that even though some progress had been made recently towards reducing the overall under five deaths, as well as the pneumonia related mortality values, it still fell short of the Millennium Development Goals expectation.

He added that pneumonia death burden could be reduced by giving vaccines like pneumococcal and Haemophilias influenza type polysaccharide vaccines.

Prof. Johnson said to protect children from having pneumonia, children should be put in well ventilated housing conditions to reduce the level of domestic pollution from wood burning, and other sources of biomass combustion.