Parents hoping their baby will soon recover from a nasty bout of pneumonia and be released from hospital have welcomed new funding backing research to prevent future children from suffering the harrowing respiratory disease.
Theo Crawford remains at Perth Children’s Hospital but is on the road to recovery after spending the past two weeks being treated with antibiotics and hooked up to an IV and oxygen.
His parents Siobhan and Travis Crawford said it had been a hard couple of months seeing their son battle.
“He’s only five and a half months old and a couple of months of his little life has been spent coughing,” he said.
Theo’s cough was initially dismissed by doctors as bronchitis before he was diagnosed with pneumonia two weeks ago and rushed to PCH’s respiratory ward.
A research project working to develop the next generation of probiotics to stop children like Theo from suffering childhood pneumonia has received a $600,000 grant from this year’s round of WA Child Research Fund (WACRF) grants.
“Pneumonia is not just a problem in WA,” University of Western Australia Professor Mark Nicol, who leads the research, said.
“It’s a problem worldwide.
“It is the leading infectious killer of children in the world, so it’s an important problem, and we hope to be able to do a small part in reducing that burden.”
The preventative probiotic research is one of 11 child health research projects to receive funding from this year’s round of WACRF grants.
The grants are co-funded by the state government and Channel 7 Telethon Trust.
The UWA research project received the grant after the discovery of a microbiome that inhibits the growth of harmful bacteria in children’s lungs.
“We’re really excited to have been given this funding because it’ll allow us to take this observation forward and to move this closer to developing a product to prevent pneumonia in children,” Prof Nicol said.
He said the research could be especially helpful for Indigenous children who are 10 times more likely to catch pneumonia than non-Indigenous children.
Prof Nicol said being able to intervene using a preventative nasal spray would be “first prize.”
Mr Crawford said he would welcome any sort of pneumonia prevention strategies that might have helped Theo.
Other projects to receive funding in this year’s round of WACRF grants include research to examine why some Aboriginal children develop bronchiectasis, a project to develop treatment strategies for childhood sarcoma and a study aiming to understand the lifelong impacts of paediatric burns.
Medical Research Minister Stephen Dawson said the research work is key to finding new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat diseases and chronic conditions in children.
“These projects are just a few of the incredibly important studies that our medical researchers and innovators are working on to ensure better health outcomes for WA kids,” Mr Dawson said.
According to Prof Nicol, childhood pneumonia prevention would have the added benefit of reducing hospitalisations and antibiotic usage.
“We recognise there certainly are indications for using antibiotics in children but we want to avoid that as far as possible.
“The use of antibiotics has long-term impacts on children, for example, repeated courses of antibiotics and early life have been associated with a higher risk of asthma in children.
“We want to prevent the use of excessive antibiotics in children if we can do that by using a healthy probiotic preparation, then that would be a tremendous advance,” Professor Nicol said.