It used to be refered to as “the old mans friend”. You live to 90, surviving war, stroke, cancer, heart attack, etc., and pneumonia comes along and kills you. Of course, it can kill you when your 20 also. Why can’t medical science prevent it from killing so many? I had it when I was 17 and the doctor all but rolled his eyes at it. He gave me some kick ass (read: made me high as a kite) medicine and said “You’ll feel like shit for a week or two, maybe 3, You’ll feel like your going to die & be afraid that you won’t” (his exact words, I swear!). But I didn’t die, nor did I spend a single day in the hospital. So why does it kill as many as it does in this day of age?
I know very little about medicine, but I’ll take a couple WAG’s on this one.
First, I think that many pneumonias are caused by viruses. Modern science is shockingly weak at treating viruses once a person has been infected. Consider AIDS and the common cold. Neither of these things has been cured.
I imagine that immunization is a possibility, but pnuemonia can be caused by many different things and it would be difficult or impossible to immunize everyone for every possible cause (even assuming that vaccines exist for every possible cause).
Finally, I would speculate that any treatment for pneumonia requires that the patient’s own immune system play a role in recovery. Perhaps a good number of pneumonia victims have immune systems that are too weak to put up a decent fight, perhaps because of AIDS, advanced age, or other reasons.
Anyway, these are just WAG’s - any doctors out there, feel free to correct me.
Obligatory: IANAD.
I don’t think pneumonia kills very many healthy young adults. It’s often the official “cause of death” in older people and people who are sick from other causes (particularly AIDS, as lucwarm says). If your system is already compromised, pneumonia isn’t going to help, and it may be the final straw for a weakened body.
Also, pneumonia is simply inflamation of the lungs, and thus can be caused by a wide variety of things. If your pneumonia is caused by a virus or bacteria that your body is having a hard time fighting off, it has the potential persist a long time. If you experience pneumonia toward the end of an infection, though, you will recover more quickly.
Pneumonia prevents your lungs from efficiently absorbing oxygen, which is a pretty serious business. If you have pneumonia and you try to tough it out and don’t take care of yourself, I can see as how it’d do you in.
I’ll wait for Qagdop on this one, but I suspect luc’s most of the way there. Even within my own family, the only deaths from pneumonia were my grandmother (aged 90, moderate altzheimer’s, and weakened from hip surgeries) and my mother (aged 31, nine months into a difficult pregnancy). In the case of my mother, the physicians threw a bunch of stuff into her hoping something would stick, but since they knew it was a viral infection there wasn’t much hope that anything other than her own immune system would save her.
In hopes that Qagdop will stop by: Has medicine ever successfully cured a viral infection, analogous to antibiotics or antifungals? I recall reading (I think it was in Hooper’s The River) that it hasn’t. My understanding is that although certain antivirals help surpress viral activity (such as Zovirax for herpes or combination therapies for HIV), they don’t actually rid the body of the infective agent. Ergo the importance of vaccines.
IIRC there are a couple of vaccines about for certain pneumonias, but that’s one or two out of many.
I heard this discussed recently on NPR, so I’ve got a bit of insight into it. What we call pneumonia is actually a description for an illness that can have several causes. Bacterial pneumonia is the easiest to treat; shoot some anti-biotics into the patient, keep an eye on them, and you’ve got an excellent chance of curing them. Viral pneumonia, on the other hand, is a bit trickier. Viruses can’t be cured by anti-biotics, so the best best for someone with VP is to get to the doctor early for monitoring and other medical stuff. The late Jim Henson died of VP because he didn’t get to the doctor fast enough.
IANAD, but I do know about pneumonia.
Pneumonia is a blanket term that covers a disease with a number of causes. Usually, they’re bacterial, but they can also be viral. There are a number of different factors that can make it hard to treat.
First, there is the issue of drug resistance. Some organisms no longer respond to antibiotics the way they once did, and it becomes a challenge to find a drug that works.
Second, pneumonia is often a nosocomial infection that occurs in the hospital setting. Patients on ventilators and with central lines are most vulnerable because of the nature of introducing something into the body.
Interestingly, according to the 1998 Morbidity and Mortality Rankings, pneumonia is not a major factor in deaths until about age 65 or so. (I should point out for the sake of clarity that the cause of death listed is what’s on the death certificate as they’re abstracted and coded.)
Robin
Robin
I don’t have much to add to what’s already been said. Just wanted to point out that Jim Henson died of streptococcal pneumonia, an extremely fatal bacteria infection. Last I checked, the current thinking was, once you’ve got it, you’re gonna die. Although I remember reading a case of one guy who was diagnosed very, very early in the course of the disease, and is now comatose on a respirator.
QTM
Since we are on the subject.
A friend of mine was deathly ill several months ago with pneumonia, but the way she described it was so gross I thought I was going to puke.
Apparently the bacterial pneumonia was growing on the
OUTSIDE of her lungs… The surgeons, GAG literally
had to pull and strip the black gunk off of her lungs during surgery.
How common is this situation?
OxyMoron: “Has medicine ever successfully cured a viral infection, analogous to antibiotics or antifungals?”
Actually, antibiotics and antifungals don’t cure infections either. They do kill most bacteria/fungae (much more effectively than antivirals “kill” viruses) but it is the body’s immune defences that finish the job. That is why, for example, people with bacterial infections and no white cells are treated with both antibiotics and white cell transfusions. That is also why people wth leukemia, AIDS and other causes of severe immunodeficiency still die of bacterial and fungal infections despite being treated with antibiotics/antifungals that kill bacteria/fungi just great “in the test tube.”
Young, healthy people can usually kick pneumonia easily, unless it’s a particularly nasty type of germ like strep or hantavirus. The big issue is how healthy your lungs (and you) are to begin with.
If you have asthma or emphysema, a head cold can rapidly turn to pneumonia. Weak lungs can’t clean themselves like healthy lungs do.
Another serious form of pneumonia is aspiration pneumonia, caused by sucking something into your lungs that you shouldn’t have. This is common in trauma patients and in the elderly who have difficulty swallowing and/or coughing foreign substances out of their airways. (I once cared for a man who fell head-first down a 30 foot hole with a huge gob of Copenhagen in his mouth. He had aspirated the snuff, then vomited it, then aspirated it again. I was suctioning that crap out of every orifice, including his ears. Incredibly, despite massive head injuries and aspiration pneumonia, he recovered fully.)
Trauma medicine has advanced remarkably; injuries that would have killed you fairly quickly are now often treatable. However, trauma patients often wind up in the ICU for extended periods, usually on the ventilator, receiving multiple antibiotics and in a severely immune-compromised position.
I’d say it’s fairly common for people to die of pneumonia because: we have more elderly people, plenty of (older) people with COPD, plenty of kids with asthma, more immune-compromised people in general, and better trauma medicine (allowing people to die from pneumonia rather than from the traumatic injuries).
I believe that another set of people who die of pneumonia are people undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. The chemotherapy gets rid of the cancer but also suppresses the immune system, so the people sometimes die from pneumonia.
Then you get people like my great-grandmother, who got pneumonia at the age of 95 and made a full recovery. Then, two weeks prior to her 100th birthday, she broke her femur and had to have surgery. Oh, and she’s doing fine, living in an assisted living place and getting around with a walker. My mom’s helping her move to a downstairs apartment this weekend.
Seriously, when she had pneumonia, we all thought she was going to die. So did she. We were all very surprised and pleased when she didn’t (though she seemed to be a bit irritated with God, as she felt ready to go). The whole family flew in. We were sure this was it – the woman was 95! With pneumonia!
I want to be like her when I get old.
If the basic fatal effect of pneumonia is that the lungs are not able to deliver oxygen to the bloodstream–and remove carbon dioxide–why couldn’t these functions be taken over by an IV-drip technique, at least temporarily? Isn’t it possible to introduce some safe, oxygenated fluid into the bloodstream, and to filter-out excess CO-2?
A friend of mine died earlier this year (age 23) of pnuemonia. I don’t know the particulars of what kind he had, but it was a terrible shock. I knew pnuemonia is serious, having had it myself as a child, but to see an otherwise healthy young person succumb to it was nearly unbelievable. Thanks for this thread, it helps to have some explanation.