India tops in global pneumonia deaths of children under five years of age with 3.97 lakh reported in 2010, says a Unicef study.

The third annual International Vaccine Access Centre’s (IVAC) Pneumonia Progress Report 2012 says that almost 1,088 children under five years of age die everyday in India, an increase of 6.7 per cent from 2008 IVAC data which pegged the deaths at 3.71 lakh annually. Recent estimates from the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) show that pneumonia continues to be the number one killer of children around the world — causing 18 per cent of all child mortality, an estimated 1.3 million child deaths in 2011 alone.