London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

'Pneumonia in Children' by Kim Mulholland and Martin Weber

The symposium webcast is now available to view. 

This event is to launch a new book on childhood pneumonia, 'Pneumonia in Children' the main cause of serious illness and death in children throughout the world. This is the first book on the subject and it is suitable for all health workers. While the emphasis is on developing countries the book should be of interest to health professionals throughout the world.

Chair: Professor Sir Brian Greenwood
Speakers: 

• Introduction by Professor Dame Anne Mills 
• Professor Harry Campbell
• Professor Kim Mulholland and Dr Martin Weber
• Professor Sir Brian Greenwood

Biographies:

Professor Kim Mulholland is an Australian paediatrician trained at the Royal Childrens Hospital, Melbourne. He also undertook a series of clinical trials of Hib vaccine leading to a large trial that established the role of Hib vaccine for the prevention of pneumonia in African children. In 1995 he joined WHO in Geneva where he was responsible for research related to Integrated Management of Childhood Illness and bacterial vaccines including Hib and pneumococcal vaccines. Since 2000 he has been working as an independent researcher.

He has established a comprehensive pneumococcal research laboratory at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Melbourne. He has been involved in the design and implementation of most of the pneumonia vaccine trials undertaken in the developing world, and is currently leading efforts to evaluate pneumococcal vaccine impact in several Asian countries. He has maintained involvement in clinical pneumonia research in The Gambia, and was one of the group that developed the Global Action Plan for Pneumonia.

He is leading a comparative trial of the two available pneumococcal conjugate vaccines in Vietnam. He is currently Professor of Child Health and Vaccinology at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and holds professorial posts at Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Melbourne, and Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin.

Dr Martin W. Weber is a paediatrician with a PhD in epidemiology. He worked as a research clinician in the Medical Research Council Laboratories in The Gambia from 1992 to 1998, where he undertook research into pneumonia aetiology, diagnosis and management, particularly into oxygen delivery, newborn infections, RSV and the vaccine trials against Hib and the pneumococcus. He was involved inthe development and testing of treatment algorithms for WHO which led to the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness. 

Since 1998, hehas been working for the World Health Organization, first in Geneva, where he was in charge of developing treatment guidelines for children in small hospitals (“Pocket book of hospital care for children”), and for air pollution as a risk factor for pneumonia. He was one of the initiators of the Global Action Plan for Pneumonia.  

From 2007, he worked in the WHO Indonesia country office responsible for maternal and child health and nutrition, from 2013 to 2014 as the Regional Adviser for Maternal and Reproductive Health in the WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia, and since as the Programme Manager for Child and Adolescent Health in the WHO Regional Office for Europe in Copenhagen. 

Professor Harry Campbell is the Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. During the 1980s Harry worked as a clinical research officer at the MRC Laboratories in the Gambia, where he conducted pivotal studies on the epidemiology and aetiology of childhood pneumonia in a rural African setting, as well as the first Hib vaccine studies in The Gambia. In 1989 he left The Gambia to join WHO where he was instrumental in developing the newly established WHO Programme for Control of Acute Respiratory Infections.

Since returning to Edinburgh he has remained active in the field of childhood pneumonia research, leading educational programs in the field and leading the pneumonia component of the WHO/UNICEF Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group (now Maternal and Child Health Estimation and Evaluation Group). His group has been responsible for current global estimates of the burden of pneumonia, and the specific burden attributable to RSV and influenza. 

Professor Sir Brian Greenwood - After qualification in medicine at Cambridge University,  Brian Greenwood  spent 15 years working in Nigeria, first  at University College Hospital, Ibadan and then at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria where he helped to start a new medical school. In 1980, he moved to The Gambia where he spent the next 15 years as director of the UK’s Medical Research Council Laboratories. 

In The Gambia, his research focussed on the prevention of the major infectious diseases prevalent in West African children including malaria, pneumonia and meningitis.  These studies included a programme of research on the causes of  pneumonia in young African children  and how the two main causes, infection with Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) could be prevented by vaccination. In 1996, he moved to the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine where he has maintained his research on the prevention of malaria, meningococcal and pneumococcal infections in Africa with a special focus on research capacity development in Africa. 

The event will be followed by a reception where there will be a chance to chat with the authors and presenters.