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Dear Colleagues & Friends, As Chairpersons of the 4th Global Conference for World Pneumonia Day 2024, it gives us great pleasure to invite you to join our event, which is part of the Worldwide Pneumonia Awareness Campaign-Pneumolight, with the support of the Philippine College of Physicians (PCP) in Manila, to be held on 9 November 2024. Despite the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, pneumonia remains a neglected disease. Sadly, the 2021 Global Burden of Disease report showed that 2.1 million people died of pneumonia in that year; children under five years and adults over 70 continued to be the most vulnerable populations, with more than 500,000 and 1 million pneumonia-related deaths respectively. Another important problem is the impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR); according to the 2019 GBD report, 1.27 million deaths were attributable to bacterial AMR in that year, and one in five deaths caused by AMR occurred in children under five years old. The 2019 GBD report identified Streptococcus pneumoniae as the most frequent pathogen causing pneumonia, Although great progress continues to be made, the worldwide burden of pneumonia remains huge. We need everyone to know about the disease and its impact on our health, and above all, we need to show that it can be prevented. Pneumonia must be recognized as a major global health problem. Until this recognition comes, we will continue our attempts to educate and prevent, because we know that education is prevention and prevention saves lives. Working together, we can move the world because we know that if we fight, we can win!!!! Yours sincerely, Catia Cilloniz |
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Louis Bont, MD, PhD, is a Pediatric Infectiologist-Immunologist and the head of the Pediatric Department at the University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands. He is the founding chairman of ReSViNET, an international respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) research consortium. His specific research interests include RSV pathogenesis and the burden of disease.
Dr. Bont's work focuses on unraveling the role of neutrophils, RSV-related mortality, and long-term airway disease following RSV infection. He is the lead investigator of the INFORM study, a large prospective global clinical virology study that aims to uncover the molecular epidemiology of RSV in over 2000 children. He also leads the RSV GOLD mortality registry, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
His group collaborates with the World Health Organization on RSV surveillance and vaccine development. Dr. Bont’s research emphasizes clinical and translational mechanisms of disease and the identification of intervention targets for RSV bronchiolitis. He has been the lead author of over 300 publications in peer-reviewed medical journals.
Additionally, he founded the Training of Upcoming Leaders in Pediatric Science (TULIPS), a career training network for clinician scientists in the field of Child Health.
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