SARS scare overshadows World Asthma Day

Millions of people have asthma and thousands die every year. Yet World Asthma Day was commemorated last Tuesday, it’s theme was the Burden of Asthma, its purpose was to raise awareness of the severe impact of asthma, and, there was hardly any mention of it in media. This was because of the SARS scare. It is true that SARS can be a deadly disease. But statistics show that only about six percent of the people who get SARS die of the disease. The rest recover on their own.

Both asthma and SARS are respiratory diseases. Both to this day have no known cure. There are medicines that can relieve an asthma attack. But asthma is a chronic condition and, and sad to say, it is the most chronic condition of childhood. SARS is caused by a virus. Asthma is a form of allergy. The asthmatic wheezes, coughs and finds great difficulty in breathing when he comes into contact with substances called allergens that are totally harmless to normal people. Emotional problems also trigger asthma attacks. What happens if an asthmatic is contaminated with SARS? We don’t know if there has already been such a case, but the most logical thing to expect is that the SARS will aggravate the asthma and the asthma will exacerbate the SARS. In short, it may make breathing impossible.

World Asthma Day started in 1998 when in conjunction with the first World Asthma meeting, more than 35 countries met in Barcelona, Spain. Since then, more and more countries have participated and World Asthma Day is the world’s most important agency to call attention to the fact that asthma is a global problem that cannot be ignored.

The group planning World Asthma Day is the Global Initiate for Asthma (GINA), one of the ramifications of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in the United States. GINA provides positive steps asthmatics can take to minimize the burden of asthma. We don’t know if the Philippines is an official member of GINA. If so, we don’t know of any activity in the last Tuesday’s World Asthma Day celebration. There are so many things we could do to help alleviate the plight of asthmatics in the country, specially Metro Manila.

Our cosmopolitan city is one of the most polluted urban centers in the world. To date, nothing has been done to alleviate the pollution problem in Metro Manila. The pollution comes from two sources: Smoke-belching vehicles and factories that emit smoke from their chimneys. Asthma Day would have been the right occasion to call attention to the need of having a long-range program of ridding Metro Manila of pollution. They say that the beginning of health is to know the disease. We say that the beginning of health is a healthy environment. The cause of asthma is in the air that we breathe. There is little we can do about allergens. But we can certainly minimize pollution.