Three Hundred Sixty Three Million and Counting

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The World Health Organization's most recent figures put the global scale of asthma in stark terms: an estimated 363 million people living with the disease in 2023, and 442,000 deaths that year alone, making it the most common chronic disease among children worldwide. The condition itself, inflammation and muscle tightening around the airways that make breathing difficult, is well understood and, for most patients, well controlled with modern treatment.

What the same data makes clear is that control is not evenly available. The World Health Organization reports that most asthma deaths occur in low- and lower-middle-income countries, where under-diagnosis and under-treatment remain a serious barrier, and that as of 2023 potentially life-saving bronchodilators were stocked in public primary health care facilities in less than two-thirds of those countries, with steroid inhalers available in less than half. A disease with a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old name and a thoroughly modern understanding still kills largely along the fault lines of access rather than the limits of medical knowledge.