UNIVERSITY OF PHOENIX
CULTURAL AND DISEASE PAPER
The disease that I am writing about today is Asthma. This disease is a severe allergic reaction in which the bronchial tubes in the lungs swell and become blocked with mucous. The membranes lining the inner walls of the air passages become inflamed, causing the airways to narrow and making it difficult to breathe. Asthma affects roughly 17 million
Americans. Five million of those affected by this disease are under the age of 18, making asthma the most common chronic childhood disease. That means that roughly 1 in 20 people out of the general American population including children currently suffer from this incurable disease. This disease causes more than 14 people to die daily from asthma. In my research I found that over the past decades these figures have been steadily increasing in the United State. As our air, water, and food become more polluted with chemicals more people are affected by Asthma. We will continual to see an increase in this disease as long as infants are introduced to solid foods at an early age, and food additives increase, and plants are genetically manipulated to form foods that have a higher allergic potential. Symptoms of asthma may include recurrent attacks of breathlessness, wheezing when breathing out, a dry cough, and excessive mucous. Tightness in the chest during a severe attack, also include sweating and rapid heartbeat, distress and anxiety, an inability to sleep or speak. This disease potentially increased vulnerability to the effects of exposure to air pollutants. There are those who are innately more susceptible to the effects of exposure to air pollutants than others. Those who become more susceptible for example as a result of environmental or social factors or personal behavior and those who are simply exposed to unusually large amounts of air pollutants.