What is Asthma:

There is so many signals, so many clues, but still no understanding of asthma. Asthma dominates the waking hours of millions of adults and children worldwide. Asthma 'from my experience' feels like constantly drowning, over and over again and also the feeling that when having an attack that this is the one that is going to finish me off. These are my feelings and the feelings of others. Severe attacks are a fight for life. It goes on over and over again every day. This is my life as an severe asthmatic. A constant battle to live ,every day. There 'in my opinion 'is not enough adequate funding for asthma. Heart disease and cancer upstage the long-term misery of those who labour just to breath. There is millions of adults and children with the disease and we feel, neglected and let down. I 'personally' feel frustrated. Not understood. Alone and helpless, and yet, still no real explanations. Still no cure.

One reasons asthma is difficult to tackle is because it is very badly understood. Asthma is not a new disease either. The Greeks named it that and it means difficult breathing'. We still cannot agree on what asthma really is, and it's strange that everyone has it differently. We also cannot be sure of what really causes asthma and why asthma is still on the incline. Asthma is a big jumbled up mess. Lot's of theories over the years, have been rejected, and I am sure more will also go in the trash can. Nothing with asthma seems to be simple, 'in any way'.

When you ask people about asthma, some get the picture of it as an entire family, who live next to a busy road, or a family of chain smoking parents. Well pollution and smoke do cause asthma. They trigger it off, but we are still struggling to determine, whether, cigarettes, traffic and other air pollutions cause asthma of if they just make it worse. Pregnant women who smoke, do though increase their babies chances of getting a lung disease by one and a half. Also people who are exposed to second hand cigarette smoke, are more likely to get asthma, but smoking has been around for a long time now, so you cannot really blame cigarettes on the cause or increase of asthma.

The fact is that single-cause theories do not seem to ring any bells. At one time allergens alone, where thought to be the key. Everyone went on a cleaning spree to stamp out dustmites. It did help some, but the wheezing continued. For the last few decades the theory now seems to be that we clean and use to much cleaning products. People seemed to have sealed their homes and children rarely play outside, for fear off infections and colds. We take vacinations for everything. If germs break through we take antibiotics. Bacteria and human children no longer co-excist as they used to. The wall of cleanliness between us and the world may have had an unfortunate consequence. Prehaps infection in early childhood 'used to prevent allergies and asthma'. Is the window of opportunity, in the first years of life? We are not encouraged though, to bacteria exposure.

Is it our diets that cause asthma. Modern hygenic foods covered in pestisides and preservitives could be to blame. Is it possible that our sterile diets, could be why the immune system is not switching over to defend against infections. Today we eat a more varied diet. We have a more fruit and vegetable selection than we used to. It's all clean, but I do not think food hygiene is the answer either. If you take preservitives out of food, we would have more food poisoning.

Lung disease, that includes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneunomia as well as asthma is the fourth biggest killer in the world. A third of children are suffering, and this is unacceptable. It has to be higher on the agenda. Two thirds of asthma deaths are preventable. Often patients are caught out. They get themselves into circumstances where they do not have there treatment, or their asthma just spirals out of control. The fact we are losing children to the disease is totally unacceptable. We underplay the significance of the disease, because it does not hurt.

So we plough on, hearing about, break throughs here, and discoverys there, and yet we still cannot find a cure or the true cause. Could asthma be something that is caused in the womb? Maybe asthma could be allergy linked, but severe asthma could be a different story. It is almost as if they are two different diseases. Mild asthma and life threatening asthma. In the past few years there is evidence that the airways of severe asthmatics are either permenatley altered or developed differently in the womb. A first gene discovered in asthma is thought to possibly control the way the muscle developes in the airways. Enviromental factors could well be taking there toll at a much earlier stage that anyone used to imagine. This could be influencing the expression of genes in the developement of the foetus. Cigarette smoke can cause genetic changes in a babies lungs in the womb, which makes it at risk from asthma.

What seems to be the the long term plan for asthma. What can we do. We have to get people to take asthma more seriously, if we want to get any further. We have to make people understand the disease, and make sure enough is being spent on its research. Why does no one seem to care? Prehaps people are unaware that not enough is being spent 'worldwide' on asthma. This is not good enough. What is going on? People really do not realise asthma's severity, so no one seems to care. Maybe this is why so many severe asthmatics are depressed. They blame the disease. I blame the complete lack of support from everone around me.