Like many 42-year-old fathers of two, Orin Levine was periodically distracted during our Sunday phone conversation by his playful daughters, Abby and Jessie. It's difficult to talk uninterrupted when your 6-year-old and 4-year-old are giggling and scurrying about, petitioning for your attentions.
Orin Levine is happy to be distracted, however. He knows better - indeed, firsthand - what the devastating alternatives look like for certain parents in less fortunate corners of the globe.
Dr. Levine is an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a leading expert on pneumococcal disease - which, like some mysterious and frightening force in a Will Smith movie, is the relatively overlooked killer of up to 1 million children annually worldwide.
Actually, scratch "mysterious," because there's no mystery about the causes and consequences of childhood pneumonia. The bigger mystery is why the United States isn't taking a lead role in eradicating this killer. If we can spend $165 billion to salvage the AIG executives' bonuses, surely we can come up with half that to save a few million kids' lives.
The pneumococcus bacterium is common and usually harmless; about one in six children in American day care facilities have it. The real problem is when bacteria move from the upper respiratory track down into the alveoli of the lungs, where the pulmonary system does the vital work of circulating oxygen into the bloodstream and carbon dioxide out. The pneumonia that ensues initially makes it harder to breathe but, left untreated, will eventually deprive the body's other organs of sufficient oxygen.
In developing nations, pneumococcal diseases like pneumonia, meningitis and septicemia can account for up to 10 percent of childhood fatalities, and death comes as quickly as three days. The "lucky" survivors often suffer lifelong physical and mental damage. In third world countries, this fate can be almost as bad as death because at least one adult will be needed to supervise and care for that child around the clock, thereby crippling the family financially.
Dr. Levine co-chairs the Pneumococcal Awareness Council of Experts and currently serves as the executive director of PneumoADIP (Accelerated Development and Introduction Plan), an organization supported by the GAVI Alliance and dedicated to accelerating access to the pneumococcal vaccine for children in the 72 poorest countries.
