Health Care, Provinces

Ministry: 94 Children Die Of Pneumonia So Far This Year

At least 94 children under the age of five have died between January and April this year in Peru as a result of pneumonia, the Health Ministry said.

The ministry said that there have been some 800,000 cases of respiratory infections in the Andean country during the four-month period, while there have been almost 9,300 cases of pneumonia.

The majority of pneumonia victims live in Peru’s southern mountainous regions, some of the country’s poorest areas, where temperatures drop well below zero degrees Celsius through at least nine months of the year.  

According to the ministry, 359 children in Peru’s Andean highlands died of pneumonia in 2011 due to a sharp drop in temperatures.

The World Health Organization says pneumonia is the main cause of infant mortality in the world. About 1.4 million children die of pneumonia every year.

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