Asthma Death Rate Decrease Attributed to Improved management
While this is good news, we need to look deeper into what this means. First, the rates of asthma are increasing almost as rapidly as diabetes in our population. Next, “control” of asthma dictates a reliance on pharmaceutical drugs with significant side effects. I would much rather prefer the term “suppress” to indicate that once the drugs are removed, the conditions that initially caused the airway hyper-responsiveness are still present. There are many natural, healthy ways to deal with asthma without the dependency of pharmaceuticals.
Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol. 2000;85:121-127 The asthma death rate dropped 4% in the United States in 1997, most likely due to improved disease management. “The decrease of asthma deaths in children less than 15 years of age is most significant, falling from 191 in 1996 to 154 in 1997, which is the greatest decrease in any single year since 1971,” said author R. Michael Sly, MD, head of the Section of Allergy and Immunology at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. “However, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was the eighth leading cause of death at 5 through 14 years of age in 1997. Asthma accounts for almost all of the deaths in this category in this age group,” he said.