Dr. Cherian recieving the PACE Global Leadership Award

On the heels of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s $10 billion commitment to fund vaccine research, development and delivery throughout the developing world, a leading pneumonia expert, Dr. Thomas Cherian of the World Health Organization (WHO), was honored Monday in Geneva for his efforts to accelerate access to vaccines preventing pneumococcal disease, the world’s leading vaccine-preventable killer of children under age five.

Over the course of a 25-year career that began at the Christian Medical College in Tamil Nadu, India, Dr. Cherian, who currently serves as coordinator of the Expanded Programme on Immunization at the WHO, has made significant contributions and remained committed to fighting pneumonia and pneumococcal diseases.  Last year, he led efforts to produce the first-ever country-by-country estimates of pneumococcal disease burden. This work found that in India, for example, more than 140,000 children die each year of pneumococcal disease — approximately one child every four minutes in India alone.

Dr. Cherian received the Pneumococcal Awareness Council of Expert’s (PACE) Global Leadership Award, which recognizes an individual, organization or country that has championed pneumococcal disease prevention and made a significant contribution towards policies that advance the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines.  Pneumococcal disease is a leading cause of pneumonia which kills an estimated 2 million children under age five each year.

The contributions of individuals to the health field are not always publicized but it’s the efforts of individuals like Dr. Cherian that add to the collective goal of reducing deaths from preventable and treatable diseases, whether infectious or neglected.

The Global Network and PACE are initiatives of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, whose mission is to reduce needless human suffering from infectious and neglected tropical diseases.

But as I sat there drinking my coffee, I was struck by two thoughts tertiary to the event itself:

• The Mansfield Room, in which the reception was held, is like many rooms in the Capitol in that its appearance conveys a sense of grandeur and gravitas.  To be in that room discussing maternal child health issues signaled to me that we have come a long way in bringing these issues to the fore as important, urgent matters for key policymakers
• At the Global Network, it is easy to fall into an NTD-focused mindset. Yet an event like today’s, focused primarily on pneumonia, was remarkably relevant to the work we are doing around maternal child health as a broader platform.  Even the messaging–”cheap interventions, proven solutions, a need for partnership to deliver treatments in the field…”–echoed the messages we recite daily with respect to NTDs.  As we move forward with our policy and advocacy work, it serves both the NTD and the broad MCH communities well to exploit such overlap to the benefit of millions of mothers and children around the world.