Pneumonia in Children

Kim Mulholland is an Australian paediatrician trained at the Royal Childrens Hospital, Melbourne. After working in India and Sudan in his early years, he joined MRC Gambia in 1989 where he  established a program of childhood pneumonia research covering aetiology, clinical signs, management and special characteristics of pneumonia in malnourished children and very young infants. 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. 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 in the development and testing of treatment algorithms for WHO which led to the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness. Since 1998, he has 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.