What is it?
Pneumococcal refers to the bacterium, streptococcus pneumoniae, which is a spherical bacteria found in pairs that causes a whole manner of diseases including pneumonia (lung infection) and meningitis (infection of tissues surrounding the brain; Siemeniuk et al., 2011). Interestingly, this bacterium is actually a part of the normal pool of bacteria in the upper respiratory tract, which includes the nose and mouth. But under the right conditions, these little guys can become harmful and infectious, potentially killing vulnerable people. The most common disease it causes – pneumonia – includes symptoms like fever and chills, rapid breathing, trouble breathing, cough, and chest pain.
How did we Fight It?
Among infectious diseases, pneumonia was the deadliest during the early 1900s and the third largest cause of death overall (Pneumonia History, n.d.). Like many diseases at the time, major breakthroughs in understanding how diseases spread and what they looked like were occurring, and so advances in treating pneumonia was occurring, too. One new technique that was developed in 1913 was an anti-pneumococcal serum therapy. This serum was able to reduce mortality from 25% to 7.5% if given early enough in the disease progression, although this treatment was time-consuming and costly. The first antibacterial agent called sulfapyridine was developed in the 1930s and it was used to treat the famous Winston Churchill’s bacterial pneumonia in 1942, making it gain notoriety fairly quickly. This fame was short lived, however, as the antibiotic penicilin was discovered in the early 1940s, and antibiotics are extremely effective in killing the bacteria that cause infections like pneumococcal (Pneumonia History, n.d.).
Antibiotics and Antibiotic Resistance
Antibiotics are the best known treatment for any and all bacterial infections known to man. Antibiotics go in and kill the bacteria, right at the source, and all the patient needs to do is ingest a pill. However, an issue is arising that pneumonia has played a large role in creating – antibiotic resistance. Bacteria like pneumococcal have began evolving to circumvent the mechanisms that antibiotics use to kill them. This happens because of numerous reasons, but primarily because sometimes bacteria can be left alive and these bacteria eat up the remnants of the dead bacteria, taking on traits to help them battle what killed the bacteria in the first place. Antibiotics revolutionized the fight against bacterial infections, and are invaluable to our society, so it is incredibly important that resistant bacteria do not develop. If they do, we will see deaths rise like crazy, as pneumonia is an opportunistic infection, meaning it takes advantage of those who are sick already, and ‘finishes the job’ so to speak by killing them. To battle antibiotic resistance, what you can do is: make sure you finish all your antibiotics and never take them without a doctor’s supervision!
Vaccines
The desire to build a pneumococcal vaccine first began in 1911, but once antibiotics were discovered in the 1940s, efforts to develop a vaccine declined. This was the case until it was found that despite antibiotic treatment, many patients still died. In 1977, the first pneumococcal vaccine was developed (Pinkbook: Pneumococcal Disease | CDC, n.d.). It is mainly given to children younger than 5 years old and adults 65 and over, but also individuals who have certain medical conditions as they are most at risk . Pneumococcal is one of the top vaccine preventable diseases, and with antibiotic resistance on the rise, it is definitely valuable to be vaccinated against pneumococcal (Pneumococcal Vaccination: What Everyone Should Know | CDC, n.d.). So make sure grandma, grandpa, and your younger sibling are vaccinated!
References
Pinkbook: Pneumococcal Disease | CDC. (n.d.). Retrieved August 27, 2023, from https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/pneumo.html
Pneumococcal Vaccination: What Everyone Should Know | CDC. (n.d.). Retrieved August 27, 2023, from https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/pneumo/public/index.html
Pneumonia History. (n.d.). Retrieved August 25, 2023, from https://www.news-medical.net/health/Pneumonia-History.aspx
Siemieniuk, R. A. C., Gregson, D. B., & Gill, M. J. (2011). The persisting burden of invasive pneumococcal disease in HIV patients: an observational cohort study. BMC Infectious Diseases, 11, 314. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-11-314