World Asthma Day – 7 May 2024

In celebration of World Asthma Day 2024, the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) has selected the theme of 'Asthma Education Empowers'. GINA emphasizes the need to empower people with asthma with the appropriate education to manage their disease, and to recognize when to seek medical help.

Health care professionals are called upon to increase their awareness of the continuing avoidable morbidity and mortality from asthma, and the published evidence on effective management of asthma, so they are equipped to provide reliable information and optimal treatment for their patients.

Asthma is one of the most common chronic non-communicable diseases that affects over 260 million people and is responsible for over 450000 deaths each year worldwide, most of which are preventable.

Key universal issues on which education is required are under- or inaccurate diagnosis, underuse of anti-inflammatory inhaled corticosteroid inhalers, overuse, and over-reliance on short-acting beta2–agonist (SABA) inhalers, and poor recognition of patients requiring specialist assessment and further management. In low-middle-income countries, lack of availability of inhaled medicines and especially inhaled corticosteroid-containing inhalers is a major contributor to the fact that more than 90% of asthma deaths occur in these countries.

Policy makers and pharmaceutical industry are called upon to increase their awareness of the continuing preventable morbidity associated with this common disease in spite of the existence of highly effective controller treatments, and to increase their efforts to ensure that environmentally friendly inhaled medications are made available in all countries, “leaving no-one behind”. See www.ginasthma.org/reports.

World Asthma Day was first held in 1998, and has grown each year to become one of the most important Asthma events globally. On World Asthma Day, hundreds of awareness-raising activities will take place in countries all over the world. Further information about GINA and World Asthma Day can be found at GINA’s website: ginasthma.org. Documents detailing GINA’s global strategy for diagnosis, management, and prevention of asthma are also available at ginasthma.org.