World Asthma Day celebrated today

KOLKATA: World Asthma Day is an annual event organized by the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) ) in collaboration with the World Health Organisation (WHO) to increase the awareness among public worldwide about the precautions and preventions of the asthma.

It is celebrated on annual basis at 1st Tuesday of the May month. This year marks 20th World Asthma Day. The theme of this year's event is 'Never too early, never too late'. 'It's always the right time to address airways disease'.

The theme provides a call to action for both patients and healthcare providers worldwide to evaluate symptoms regardless of the time point in one's life they may occur and take actions to ensure that the asthma is controlled.

World Asthma Day was first observed in 1998. To mark this day West Bengal Chief Minister tweeted, "Today is World Asthma Day.

Asthma can be controlled. Let us pledge to curb air pollution and ensure clean breathing air for our future generations.

" The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 235 million people currently suffer from asthma across the world. It is a common disease among children.

In India, around 2 crore people



suffer from asthma."

India has an estimated 1.5-2 crore asthmatics and rough estimates indicate its prevalence between 10 per cent and 15 per cent in 5-11 year old children," says Dr MK Gupta, senior allergy and asthma specialist at AANCH Hospital.

"At present 25 per cent of population suffers from allergy in our country. Five per cent of them are suffering from asthma and even in developed countries like USA there is 10 per cent increase in Asthma patients every year," he added.

Every year GINA organizes variety of programmes every year with the help of organizers and associates like health care groups and asthma educators to encourage and motivate common public using the sub-theme called "It's Time to Control Asthma".

GINA decides the every year's theme of celebration as well as distributes the materials and resources to the organizers to organize programmes.

Various health care professionals, members, educators and other health care organizations take part in the celebration by showing their activities related to the asthma at many public places in order to help people reducing their burden of asthma.