
World Asthma Day (WAD) 2024 is elevating asthma awareness to the global stage, bringing attention to the 262 million people around the world living with asthma, and promoting allergic triggers, new treatments and promising research.
Sponsored by the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA), this year’s theme for the May 7 designation is “Asthma Education Empowers.” WAD encourages health care professionals to educate themselves about the potential to avoid and reduce asthma morbidity and mortality, and to understand effective asthma treatment and management. Each year, asthma is responsible for over 450,000 deaths worldwide, most of which are preventable.
According to GINA, adequate asthma education is lacking in the areas of accurate diagnosis, underuse and overuse of anti-inflammatory inhaled corticosteroid inhalers, over-reliance on short-acting beta2–agonist (SABA) inhalers and poor recognition of patients requiring a specialist assessment and continued management. In low- to middle-income countries, the lack of access to inhaled asthma drugs (particularly inhaled corticosteroid-containing inhalers) significantly contributes to more than 90% of needless asthma deaths in these countries.
GINA recently published its 2024 Global Strategy for Asthma Management and Prevention report, which incorporates new information about asthma based on a review of recent literature by its science committee. This report contains extensive citations from the scientific literature and forms the basis for other GINA documents and programs.