World Asthma Day: Home furniture, carpets, curtains smoking and air pollution responsible for uncurable disease – Asthma

Beware! Home furniture, carpets, curtains, smoking, and air pollution are the major factors behind making one asthmatic. Asthma affects over 260 million people globally besides taking 4.5 million lives in a year. Pakistan is marking a five percent yearly increase in its 10 million asthma patients till the year 2024.
World Asthma Day is observed in the world including in Pakistan today. This year’s theme of his day was “Asthma Education Empowers.” Asthma is one of the most common chronic non-communicable and uncurbable diseases. Pakistan is the world’s fifth most populated country with 221 million inhabitants. Nearly five percent of these are suspected to suffer from asthma.
Seasonal asthma is important in selected parts of the country including the federal capital and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Most seasonal asthma is triggered by various indoor and outdoor airborne allergens, however, several factors like occupational asthma in poorly controlled work environments, environmental pollution, and lifestyle changes, also contribute significantly to the increasing asthma prevalence.
The World’s health organizations celebrating this day emphasized the need to empower people with asthma with the appropriate education to manage their disease and to recognize when to seek medical help. Healthcare professionals are called upon to increase their awareness of the continuing avoidable morbidity and mortality from asthma, and they highlight the need for effective management of this disease.
They highlighted key issues on which education is required to avoid inaccurate diagnosis, underuse of anti-inflammatory inhaled corticosteroid inhalers, and overuse of medicines prescribed by quacks and non-medical practitioners. They said that poor diagnoses and avoiding specialist assessments can aggravate the disease.
Policymakers and the pharmaceutical industry were asked to increase their awareness of the continuing preventable morbidity associated with this common disease despite the existence of highly effective controller treatments. Medical experts addressing programs on raising awareness of asthma observed that the prevalence of asthma was high in adults and equally in children, but could emerge at any stage of life.
Its prevalence was increasing every day for adopting the Western lifestyle, pollution, urbanized style of life, use of carpets, and curtains, and exposure to allergies in life. Head of Chest Medicine at the Jinnah Post-graduate Medical Centre Dr Nadeem Rizvi was reported as saying that asthma prevalence had reached 19 percent during the last decade and studies showed an annual nine percent increase in the number of such cases in Pakistan.
He said that the major reasons for the prevalence of asthma were genetic predisposition, and exposure to allergy in intrauterine life through wide use of carpets, sofas, and furniture carrying dust mites. The disease may hit children during early infancy. Parents must not resort to smoking in the presence of young children and women, and if anyone finds symptoms of asthma for the first time, he should think about the possibility of occupational asthma because people are working in heavily polluted workplaces without any protective gear, he said.
He said that two types of treatment were easily available in reliever drug and controller drug. While the reliever drug should be taken only when required, the controller drug could be used on a regular basis to prevent recurrent exacerbation. Both types of medicines should be taken preferably through inhaler as a small amount of drug is required to produce desirable effects without causing any significant side effects.
He pointed out that in public sector hospitals, inhalers were not routinely available to poor asthmatic patients. Indoor and outdoor pollution can be reduced by removing carpets and curtains and keeping a minimum number of items in bedrooms. Regular cleaning and washing all bedding with warm water may also reduce the risk,” he said.
However, it is important to note that Asthma is a chronic disease characterized by recurrent attacks of breathlessness, cough, and wheezing which vary in frequency and severity from person to person. It is one of the most chronic diseases in the world. Asthma accounts for at least one in every 250 deaths. Studies reveal that asthma deaths will increase by almost 20% in the next 10 years if urgent actions are not taken.
Asthma is present in almost every country regardless of the level of development. Over 80 percent of deaths with asthma occur in low and middle-income countries. The prevalence of this disease in Pakistan is increasing every day – an annual increase of 5 percent of which between 20 to 30 percent are children aged 13-15 years. Nearly 20 million people of which 12 percent are adult Pakistani are already suffering from this disease.