May 25, 2000 – According to a report by the Pew Commission on Environmental Health, an organization attached to the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, the number of Americans with asthma could double in the next 20 years for reach one in fourteen people.
According to Dr Paul Locke, director of the Pew Commission, “the report documents the well-known fact that we are in the midst of an asthma epidemic and that things are getting worse instead of better.”
While the number of people with asthma increased by 75% between 1980 and 1994 in the United States, the increase was 160% among children under the age of four. This increase in asthma cases has been seen in Germany, England, Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Israel, the Netherlands and Sweden, according to another study carried out in 1997 by researchers C Meza and ME Gershwin.
From antiquity until the 1920s, the frequency of asthma and mortality from asthma attacks were considered rare. In fact, until the late 1950s, there were few reports of asthma as a cause of death. In contrast, the Pew Commission report predicts that asthma deaths will increase from 5,000 to 10,000 per year in the United States by the end of this decade.
The Meza and Gershwin study points out that pollution and treatment methods may be implicated in the increase in asthma but, at the same time, more than 70% of research funds are spent on treatments and drugs and barely 9% go to prevention. “We do a lot to prevent the disease and find out its causes, and almost nothing to monitor the conditions of its emergence,” said Dr. Locke.
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Meza C, Gershwin ME. Why is asthma becoming more of a problem? Curr Opin Pulm Med. 1997 Jan; 3 (1): 6-9.
The Pew Commission report is available at http://pewenvirohealth.jhsph.edu