A model of this text was initially revealed in Undark Magazine.
On a late April afternoon, the Ngor Well being Heart in Dakar, Senegal, is serene. Daylight spills by way of architectural gaps within the ceiling and plush crops line cream-colored corridors. In a affected person ready space on the second flooring, a workers member gently rolls a ball forwards and backwards with a toddler.
The calm belies the chaos on the well being heart eight months prior, in the summertime of 2021, when COVID-19 struck the West African nation in its third and deadliest wave. The one reminder exists excessive up on the partitions: slim copper pipes educated by way of roughly drilled holes. The pipes have been constructed as Ngor frantically retrofitted its ready space with additional beds in a bid to increase the middle’s restricted oxygen community to deal with the inflow of COVID sufferers.
However to the pediatrician Idrissa Demba Ba, the scramble for oxygen—which, in many countries, got here to represent the pandemic—was nothing new. In truth, it’s a trademark of one other scourge he’s been battling for 18 years, childhood pneumonia. The illness, brought on by an an infection of the lungs that disrupts respiratory, killed 2,400 Senegalese children underneath the age of 5 in 2019.
Pneumonia will be triggered when a pathogen—as an illustration, a virus, micro organism, or fungus—enters the lungs, the place it inflames the air sacs, inflicting them to fill with fluid or pus and making it arduous to breathe. Kids are extra susceptible to the illness as a result of their lungs and immune methods are nonetheless growing. To deal with the situation, there are three important choices: antibiotics, antivirals, and oxygen. Each day, there are kids who must be linked to an oxygen provide, says Ba, who’s head of pediatric pulmonology at Dakar’s Albert Royer Nationwide Kids’s Hospital.
The World Well being Group lists oxygen as an essential medicine, which appears intuitive for a significant, life-sustaining fuel. But in Senegal and plenty of different growing international locations, offering oxygen in its medical type will be fraught: The medical-grade oxygen is pricey, getting it from one place to a different requires the development of pipelines and different infrastructure, and medical personnel have to be educated to manage it.
These supply-chain obstacles threaten, per one estimate, more than 7 million children in low- and middle-income international locations who get pneumonia every year and wish oxygen to outlive. Restricted provides are a part of the rationale the illness stays the most common infectious reason behind dying in kids worldwide, claiming the lives of more than 740,000 underneath the age of 5 in 2019. Youthful kids are extra susceptible—29 percent of pneumonia deaths happen throughout the first month of life, and three-quarters throughout the first 12 months.
Most of these affected reside in lower- and middle-income international locations like Senegal, the place the danger of pneumonia is exacerbated by malnutrition and different points, says Papa Birane Mbodji, the pinnacle of new child well being on the Division of Mom and Youngster Well being in Senegal’s Ministry of Well being and Social Motion. One other risk is the close by Sahara Desert, which sweeps in large quantities of dust that contribute to the area’s outsize international burden of younger sufferers.
When there isn’t sufficient oxygen to deal with these kids, their lungs fail, eliciting grunts as they fight desperately to rake in additional oxygen from the air, Ba says—a symptom that echoes the devastating results of COVID-19. Whereas the world’s consideration has been educated on COVID, “you possibly can mainly say there may be an ongoing pandemic of pneumonia mortality,” says Keith Klugman, an infectious-disease skilled who heads the pneumonia program on the Invoice and Melinda Gates Basis.
However there could also be an upside: The disaster of the coronavirus pandemic drew the world’s consideration to the essential significance of oxygen. Seeing how shortly international locations galvanized to deal with COVID, Klugman and different specialists wrote a Lancet article in November 2020, calling for them to construct on the pandemic’s uncommon positive aspects—corresponding to growing oxygen infrastructure—to assist curb childhood pneumonia. The authors wrote: “The COVID-19 response gives alternatives to extend diagnostic and therapy companies for respiratory infections.”
Ba and different specialists on the bottom share the sentiment. Increasingly more, they see COVID as a chance to get the important useful resource to extra kids, to deal with this forgotten epidemic.
Towards this backdrop, Senegal provided fertile floor for enchancment. Even earlier than the pandemic, and within the midst of it, the nation was interrogating its medical-oxygen infrastructure.
“The federal government of Senegal established an formidable scale-up technique for oxygen as early as 2013,” wrote Lisa Smith, the access-to-medical-devices portfolio director for the market-dynamics program on the public-health nonprofit PATH, in an electronic mail to Undark. Then in 2017, she wrote, members of the Senegalese authorities attended a PATH-led assembly targeted on widening oxygen entry. There, the federal government highlighted its work with a non-public contractor to put in and preserve pressure-swing adsorption, or PSA, crops—which produce purified oxygen from ambient air on-site—at plenty of hospitals. After this occasion, Smith stated, PATH began working with the federal government to supply further help to shut different gaps in Senegal’s oxygen-supply chain.
A 12 months into the pandemic, PATH revealed a report based mostly on a nationwide survey of medical tools, targeted on oxygen infrastructure, noting the place it was accessible and the place it was most missing.
Key among the many findings of the ensuing report was that oxygen was closely concentrated at emergency facilities in giant city areas, however a lot scarcer at smaller well being facilities and posts that serve the vast majority of the inhabitants. For example, of 29 COVID-treatment facilities surveyed throughout 13 areas, Dakar, Senegal’s capital, had the very best focus of key medical instruments—62 % of pulse oximeters, which estimate blood oxygen ranges, and 84 % of useful ventilators—regardless of the town making up lower than 1 / 4 of the nation’s inhabitants.
The tools survey additionally revealed stark disparities within the distribution of PSA crops, which give a dependable provide of oxygen. Almost half of the therapy facilities with entry to a PSA plant, which value upwards of $100,000 apiece, have been concentrated in Dakar to fulfill the wants of the town’s dense inhabitants—such because the Ngor Well being Heart’s PSA plant, which was constructed there earlier than COVID hit and have become a boon through the pandemic.
Inside a big, sun-drenched courtyard on the hospital grounds, the PSA plant hums inside a locked concrete enclosure. As a part of the setup, there’s a black field known as a compressor, which sucks in exterior air and pressurizes it. From there, the pressurized air is scrubbed because it runs by way of a filtration system to take away nitrogen and permit oxygen to move by way of. The oxygen is then transferred to holding tanks, able to be piped into the wards.
In distinction, at most different health-care amenities the place PSA crops are briefly provide, health-care staff depend on smaller items of kit corresponding to oxygen concentrators and cylinders to produce the essential fuel. These include their very own challenges: Most concentrators, that are transportable, suitcase-size machines, ship oxygen at a price that’s too sluggish for extreme COVID sufferers, and cylinders will be refilled with new oxygen solely at centralized crops, which signifies that provide will be disrupted due to unreliable transport.
Sustaining this piecemeal infrastructure can be impractical. At one other well being facility throughout city, this was evidenced by a pile of discarded concentrators strewn amongst different objects—unused respirators in water-logged packing containers, mosquito nets, and an outdated mat and metallic mattress body stripped naked—stacked underneath a zinc roof simply outdoors the entry ramp for emergency sufferers.
Such infrastructural challenges aren’t distinctive to Senegal. A 2021 WHO technical consultation revealed that earlier than the pandemic, the vast majority of low- and middle-income international locations struggled to acquire medical oxygen. In sub-Saharan international locations, 31 % of amenities had interrupted entry, whereas 25 % had none in any respect.
These wider findings on oxygen and COVID additionally helped inform child-pneumonia initiatives, together with a clinical trial designed to check the worth of pulse oximeters in these sufferers. The trial, a part of a challenge known as Instruments for Built-in Administration of Childhood Sickness, or TIMCI—collectively run by PATH, Unitaid, and the Swiss Tropical and Public Well being Institute—launched in August 2021 in a number of amenities in three international locations, together with the arid baobab-studded area of Thiès, an hour’s drive into the countryside past Dakar. Right here, TIMCI equipped pulse oximeters to medical doctors at 59 well being posts to diagnose incoming sufferers. As of September 2022, TIMCI has screened nearly 17,000 sick kids in Thiès.
The units work by attaching to a affected person’s finger and painlessly measuring the extent of oxygen of their blood. It’s a fast and cheap manner of detecting a situation by which oxygen saturation ranges dip dangerously below 90 percent, known as hypoxemia. Hypoxemia increases the risk of dying by pneumonia as much as 5 occasions.
The Senegalese trial—half of a bigger multicountry initiative additionally involving Kenya, Tanzania, India, and Myanmar—intends to guage the effectiveness of pulse oximeters in additional precisely and swiftly diagnosing hypoxemia, in an effort to then assist kids get the pressing oxygen therapy that they want and save lives. However such initiatives will solely in the end be efficient if the important oxygen provides are available close by.
On a tree-lined road in downtown Dakar, Ndèye Astou Badiane sits contained in the PATH regional headquarters considering the pandemic’s legacy. In Senegal, though the well being system struggled with an actual “enhance in demand [for] oxygen,” says Badiane, who’s a respiratory-care coordinator on the nonprofit, some good got here out of it. The clear and pressing want, she provides, injected new momentum into nationwide efforts to deal with oxygen shortages.
For example, the federal government, along with PATH, is now finalizing one other evaluation of its oxygen infrastructure, upkeep, and long-term sustainability. The overarching goal is “to enhance oxygen availability and utilization in every well being facility,” Badiane wrote in a follow-up electronic mail.
This evolving evaluation laid the muse for the federal government’s most vital transfer: the plan to roll out dozens of latest PSA crops, the models that produce oxygen on-site at hospitals, says Amad Diouf, the director of the Division of Infrastructure, Gear, and Upkeep at Senegal’s Ministry of Well being and Social Motion. These essential new oxygen crops, 5 of that are funded by UNICEF, are attributable to be put in by the tip of 2022, with a deal with well being facilities throughout the nation. Initially of the pandemic, with help from PATH and Unitaid, Senegal was capable of purchase 175 oxygen concentrators, 1,000 oxygen masks, and 250 pulse oximeters.
There are early indications that the hassle to strengthen Senegal’s oxygen gaps is translating into positive aspects within the battle in opposition to childhood pneumonia. A 2021 evaluation examine discovered that bolstering oxygen infrastructure in lower- and middle-income international locations might reduce child-pneumonia deaths in hospitals by almost half. And in Senegal, the pediatrician Mbodji says there was a notable enhance within the availability of oxygen at well being amenities. Although it’s troublesome to attribute solely to this transformation, Mbodji says, pneumonia deaths in kids have declined over the previous two years.
The pandemic has additionally given pneumonia initiatives like TIMCI particular resonance. COVID-19 was “a chance” for the Ministry of Well being to acknowledge the significance of oxygen infrastructure and speed up the unfold of lifesaving instruments like pulse oximeters by way of extra well being amenities, says Maymouna Ba, who leads the TIMCI challenge in Senegal.
“Earlier than TIMCI, earlier than COVID-19, such tools, such instruments, have been simply accessible at larger ranges like in hospitals, in well being facilities. However not in well being posts the place suppliers additionally want these sort of tools, these sort of instruments to higher detect extreme sickness within the early stage,” Ba says. With the TIMCI trial ongoing, she provides, there are plans to ultimately present much more pulse oximeters to well being posts throughout the entire nation.
Different pneumonia interventions have acquired the same enhance in recognition—such because the SPRINT challenge, or Scaling Pneumonia Response InnovaTions, a program run by UNICEF to develop entry to antibiotics and oxygen therapy for pneumonia. This system was initially confined to sure areas, however for the reason that pandemic started, Mbodji says, the federal government has been engaged on plans to increase it to your entire nation.
Senegal’s oxygen response is emblematic of modifications unfolding elsewhere. COVID made plain that “you possibly can’t watch for catastrophe to occur for the tools to be right here,” says Fatima Diaban, a critical-care doctor and member of the Each Breath Counts Coalition, an initiative by the nonprofit JustActions targeted on supporting nationwide governments in decreasing pneumonia deaths by the tip of the last decade. In Could 2021, Senegal was amongst 9 African nations to start receiving assist from PATH and the Clinton Well being Entry Initiative to acquire new oxygen tools, funded by $20 million from Unitaid. The World Fund, a world health-care-focused funding group, with help from authorities and private-sector donors, additionally offered $475 million to 66 lower- and middle-income international locations for the same goal.
Now that the pandemic has eased, a few of these sources will be redeployed to deal with childhood pneumonia—one thing that’s already underneath manner in different international locations corresponding to Ethiopia, the place the federal government announced plans in 2021 to redistribute the heart beat oximeters and oxygen therapies it used for COVID elsewhere in its health-care system.
Massive help donations typically include questions on whether or not such funding reaches the supposed recipients in its entirety. PATH’s Smith stated there are safeguards in place to make sure it does. “Every donor has distinctive necessities for accountability and accountable use of funds,” she wrote in an electronic mail. For example, her group labored carefully with Senegal’s Ministry of Well being and the Division of Infrastructure, Gear, and Upkeep to distribute donated oxygen tools to amenities in want.
General, such initiatives might fast-track progress on pneumonia, a illness that’s nonetheless “very a lot uncared for” within the international well being discourse, regardless of its international burden, says Klugman of the Invoice and Melinda Gates Basis. Pneumonia continues to be chronically underfunded, taking just 5 percent of the money dedicated to preventing infectious illness globally, and simply 3 percent of the research funding allotted to infectious ailments from 2000 to 2017 by public and philanthropic funders in G20 international locations.
Prevention will likely be essential—and progress is underneath strategy to develop new, focused vaccines, which defend higher in opposition to pneumonia in contrast with present vaccines, Klugman says. However for now, oxygen stays a uniquely environment friendly strategy to save lives. As such, the pandemic responses that many international locations have drawn up present a really perfect framework for motion—a “basis for continued declines in deaths from all-cause respiratory infections over the subsequent decade,” based on a 2021 report on pneumonia and the coronavirus pandemic produced by JustActions.
Certainly, it’s not simply kids with pneumonia who stand to learn from this unfold: Wider oxygen provisions will help individuals with infectious ailments, cardiovascular ailments, and bronchial asthma.
This bigger significance, laid naked and elevated by the pandemic, is behind the current September 2022 launch of the Lancet Global Health Commission on medical oxygen security, a brand new partnership of lecturers and NGOs, which is able to reportedly embrace sturdy illustration from lower- and middle-income international locations. The fee seeks to construct on the pandemic’s positive aspects and supply coverage makers with info and instruments to shut the essential gaps in international oxygen-supply chains.
Already, the advantages of expanded oxygen entry are evident on the Ngor well being heart, the place the copper pipes are reminders of a traumatic time however now stretch past the emergency room, ferrying oxygen to those that want it most. Simply off the principle hall of the second flooring, these pipes have been educated right into a room with partitions adorned with cheerful stickers of Dora the Explorer, flowers, and birds—a kids’s ward.
As Badiane places it: “In 2022, actually oxygen needs to be accessible and reasonably priced in each well being facility.”
