Asthma is Growing
More Common and Severe
Than Every Before
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In industrialized countries, asthma is growing more common and more severe. Five thousand people die of it every year in the United States. Currently it's the sixth most common chronic condition in the nation. Three times as many people have it now as in 1980. Some 6 million of them are children. For children, this disease is the most common chronic disorder, the leading cause of
missed school,
and the leading cause of hospitalization. *****************************QUESTION: Is polluted air helping to drive this epidemic? ANSWER: As yet, there's no scientific consensus. But the evidence pointing to air pollution as one major culprit is getting harder and harder to dispute. *****************************
QUESTION: What makes the asthmatic's airways hypersensitive to the environment? ANSWER: Genetics can play a part but DNA isn't the whole story. "Genetic changes haven't occurred rapidly enough to account for the global increase in asthma," says Anne Wright of the Arizona Respiratory Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "It pretty clearly has something to do with our interaction with the environment." Wright and other researchers agree that asthma, like cancer, has no single cause. "We won't find treatments and cures and preventive measures if we don't address the disease from different points of view -- environmental, genetic, molecular, biological," says Fernando Martinez, director of the Arizona Respiratory Center.
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