Is Pneumonia Not Sexy Enought?

There was a editorial from the science section of the New York Times in the last couple of days. It focused on Pneumonia and how it kills more people each year than Malaria and Aids around the world. There was an interview included with a Dr. who is part of an organization to raise money to increase vaccinations for children. The story really brought to light the lack of awareness of the effect of this disease and how if gets little press. This Dr. uses an interesting method to prove his point. He compared the number of deaths from a particular disease to the number of Google searches for that diseases name. What you see is an interesting correlation between the two. As the mortality rate for a disease increases, so would its Google searches. He had a chart that illustrates this very powerfully. The most interesting thing is that as you go up the mortality rate death toll and find Pneumonia, you see the Google searches drop dramatically.
My conclusion to this? Pneumonia isn’t political enough to have activist! AIDS is attached to a political movement closely associated with homosexual causes and they get a lot of press. Malaria is the bane of under developed countries where many human rights and poverty groups have their pet countries that they are trying to help. Is it possible that Pneumonia just isn’t interesting enough or it doesn’t have a big enough “hook” for the news networks to bother with? Pneumonia kills mostly children and the elderly, not people our society seems to value any longer. Now if only more celebrities and sports stars would contract Pneumonia, maybe we would actually see how this killer is more of a threat to the world than the AIDS virus.
Just to be clear, I am not saying that we should ignore AIDS or Malaria, I’m just saying that we should focus a little more on Pneumonia and its possible devastation of civilization. A pandemic is not our of the question.