Surveillance and Research

S. pneumoniae, also known as the pneumococcus, has several clinical manifestations including: pneumonia, meningitis, sepsis, bacteremia, otitis media (ear infections), abscesses, and bone and joint infections. Globally, S. pneumoniae is the leading cause of pneumonia mortality with 25-45% of all pneumonia deaths in children attributed to pneumococcus. S. Pneumonia is also the most severe cause of bacterial meningitis in children under five years of age.

Although pneumonia is consistently ranked among the top killers of infants and children in the developing world and meningitis is a deadly and debilitating disease, most regions have limited capacity to isolate S. pneumoniae and definitively diagnose pneumococcal disease. Through its surveillance activities, PneumoADIP has attempted to increase the number of countries producing pneumococcal data and to ensure the comparability of data between countries and regions enabling the estimation of disease burden in areas without ongoing surveillance activities by creating models and extrapolating results.

Surveillance and research programs that study pneumonia, meningitis, and the other manifestations of pneumococcal disease are important for several reasons:

• They help demonstrate the burden of disease due specifically to the pneumococcus while elucidating the role that other pathogens play in causing pneumonia and meningitis as well.
• They provide a better understanding of what serotypes of pneumococcus are most important in causing which clinical manifestations in which regions.
• They yield valuable information about where antibiotic resistant strains of the disease have become common and what antibiotics these strains are resistant to.
• They allow for the evaluation of new diagnostic tests that may allow for more accurate and effective surveillance and treatment in the future.
• They help to enable researchers to create estimates about the potential impact of routine vaccination.

PneumoADIP-funded research and surveillance activities include surveillance networks and small grant projects in Africa, Asia, and the Americas as well as other research initiatives around the globe. Currently, eight networks in Africa (AFRO), South Asia (SEARO), Latin America (PAHO), the Eastern Mediterranean (EMRO) and the Western Pacific (WPRO) regions have collected surveillance data on meningitis, pneumonia, and sepsis in children and adults. Through these networks, investigators are conducting pneumococcal disease surveillance in both rural and urban areas while working to promote information sharing on disease serotypes and antimicrobial-resistance patterns among local clinicians and policy-makers.