World Pneumonia Day

World Pneumonia Day takes place on November 12, 2016. World Pneumonia Day provides an annual forum for the world to stand together and demand action in the fight against pneumonia. Pneumonia is a preventable and treatable disease that sickens 155 million children under 5 and kills 1.6 million each year. This makes pneumonia the number 1 killer of children under 5, claiming more young lives than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. Yet most people are unaware of pneumonia's overwhelming death toll. Because of this pneumonia has been overshadowed as a priority on the global health agenda, and rarely receives coverage in the news media. World Pneumonia Day helps to bring this health crisis to the public's attention and encourages policy makers and grassroots organizers alike to combat the disease. In spite of the massive death toll of this disease, affordable treatment and prevention options exist. There are effective vaccines against the two most common causes of deadly pneumonia, Haemophilus influenzae type B and Streptococcus pneumoniae. A course of antibiotics which costs less than $1(US) is capable of curing the disease if it is started early enough. The Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia (GAPP) released by the WHO and UNICEF on World Pneumonia Day, 2009, finds that 1 million children's lives could be saved every year if prevention and treatment interventions for pneumonia were widely introduced in the world's poorest countries.

Scientist of the day - Ernst Otto Fischer

Ernst Otto Fischer was a German chemist and educator who was jointly awarded the ‘Nobel Prize in Chemistry’ in 1973 along with English chemist Geoffrey Wilkinson for their independent but related leading-edge work in metallocenes and other aspects in the field of organometallic chemistry. This pioneering work of Fischer included identifying an entirely new technique of combining organic substances and metals. He examined a newly developed organometallic compound ferrocene (chemical formula - Fe(C5H5)2) and came to the conclusion that it is composed of two carbon rings each of five sides, bound on opposite sides of an iron atom. Moving on he began synthesizing other metallocenes like cobaltocene and nickelocene. These organometallic compounds are also called ‘sandwich compounds’. After obtaining PhD from the ‘Technical University of Munich’ he went on to become a Lecturer of Chemistry at the university. His career advanced steadily that saw him holding the position of a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the ‘University of Munich’, subsequently becoming the Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the ‘Technical University of Munich’ and finally holding the Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at the ‘Technical University of Munich’. Apart from the ‘Nobel Prize’ he was the recipient of the ‘Göttingen Academy Prize for Chemistry’ in 1957 and the ‘GCS Alfred Stock Memorial Prize’ in 1959.

Childhood & Early Life

• He was born on November 10, 1918, in Solln near Munich, Germany, to Dr. Karl Tobias Fischer and his wife, Valentine Danzer as their third child. His father was a Professor of Physics at the ‘Technical College of Munich’.
• He attended elementary school for four years and then enrolled at the ‘Theresiengymnasium’, the oldest grammar school in Munich in 1929 from where he completed his graduation in 1937 with Abitur.
• While he was on his two years of compulsory military service, the ‘World War II’ started that saw him serving in France, Poland and Russia.
• He started studying chemistry at the ‘Technical University of Munich’ during the later part of 1941 while he was on a military study leave. After the Americans released him in the autumn of 1945, he resumed his studies in 1946 following reopening of the ‘Technical University of Munich’ and completed BS in Chemistry from the university in 1949.
• He was inducted in the Inorganic Chemistry Institute at the ‘Technical University of Munich’ as a scientific assistant of Professor Walter Hieber, who was considered father of metal carbonyl chemistry. Under the guidance of Hieber, Fischer worked on his doctoral thesis titled ‘The Mechanisms of Carbon Monoxide Reactions of Nickel (II) Salts in the Presence of Dithionites and Sulfoxylates’ and earned PhD in 1952.
• Accepting invitation of Hieber, he continued his research work at the college and went on to focus his studies on transition of metal and organometallic chemistry. Through his university lecture thesis, ‘The Metal Complexes of Cyclopentadienes and Indenes’, he pointed out that the molecular structure of ferrocene assumed by Pauson and Keally might be incorrect.

Awards & Achievements

• He received the ‘Nobel Prize in Chemistry’ in 1973 along with English chemist Geoffrey Wilkinson.

Personal Life & Legacy

• Fischer never married in his life.
• He passed away on July 23, 2007, in Munich, Germany, at the age of 88 years.