Why the climb?

So then the question is, why has the diagnosis of asthma dramatically climbed over the last hundred years? I have often wondered this myself. Is it because people didn’t have asthma before the 20th century? “While scriptures from China as far back as 2,600 B.C.E. and ancient Egypt mention symptoms of breathlessness and respiratory distress, asthma did not have its name or unique characteristics until Hippocrates described it over 2,000 years later in Greece”⁶ (medicalnewstoday 2018).

We see that asthma seems to have been around for thousands of years, but we see an uptick in diagnoses starting in the 20^th century. I had always thought this to be because this would’ve been the start of when pollution from factories and cars began to ramp up. A type of asthma called occupational asthma seems to suggest this could be a possibility. “Occupational asthma is asthma that’s caused by breathing in chemical fumes, gases, dust or other substances on the job”⁷ (mayoclinic 2020). Though this is more explicitly talking about job hazards, I do think it would be fair to correlate chemical fumes with pollution as a whole. Our air quality suffered massively into the 1980s. Before this decade, cars were using lead gasoline, and emission concerns were very lax. Factories were not regulated like they are today in regards to their emissions. Even with regulations in place today, overall air quality is still not the same as before we started to utilize fossil fuels to run our world. I do feel this does have a direct impact on the asthma epidemic today. In fact, I feel like the increase in diagnosis in general for other health issues could be correlated back to the use of fossil fuels.

I found it interesting that a child’s living situation can contribute to asthma. “The “hygiene hypothesis,” which has been implicated in lowering the risk of asthma, suggests that exposure to microbes and higher rates of cross-infection early in life can activate type 1 helper cells, thus offsetting inflammatory pathways associated with asthma development”⁸ (annalsofglobalhealth 2019). The same could be said for sickness in general in children (common cold, for example). I always knew this about general sickness but never thought that it could be a factor for asthmatics. The data suggests that lower developed countries will not be as clean as more developed as a whole, which does seem to benefit children in regards to asthma and not getting the disease.