The persistent cough of her one-and-a-half year old son Mathew had been hidden as a seasonal flu. But Dr Tabitha Mwangi, a lecturer at Pwani University, missed signs of pneumonia, a disease rated as top killer of children under five years in East Africa.
“He was not himself. I imagined before that a child with pneumonia would be coughing and spluttering and doing something dramatic but he was not,” says Dr Mwangi.