Moses Maimonides the physician to the Islamic King Saladin in 1150AD said about Asthma –

''I have no magic cure to report, all I have in mind is a rational conduct of life.''

The basic principle on how to control this chronic disease which affects almost 300 million worldwide remains the same as was prophesied by Maimonides. Asthma is perhaps the most commonly discussed respiratory disease after the common cold. The word asthma is derived from a Greek work meaning 'breathlessness or panting'' both of which accurately describe an attack of asthma.

The World Asthma Day's theme this year is,`You can control asthma.'

'The aim is to ensure that people understand the need to be on inhalers and maintenance dose of drugs,'' Dr. R.Narasimhan , chairman of the Respiratory Research Foundation of India, a non-governmental organization.

Control of asthma keeps throwing up new areas of research and at times continues to be an enigma. For instance, a new study suggests that the overuse of antibiotics in early childhood could be partly responsible for the alarming rise in asthma and allergies in recent years, a new study suggests. Another recent study suggests that Mediterranean diet, high in vegetables and fruit but low in saturated fat children brought up on vegetable-rich diet are less likely to be affected by asthma.

When a person with asthma comes into contact with something that irritates their airways (an asthma trigger), the muscles around the walls of the airways tighten so that the airways become narrower and the lining of the airways becomes inflamed and starts to swell. Sometimes sticky mucus or phlegm builds up which can further narrow the airways.

But it is not clear exactly what makes the airways of people with asthma inflamed in the first place. The inflamed airways may be due to a combination of things. We know that if other people in the family have asthma, the chance of another person who is likely to develop it is high. New research suggests that environmental factors such as tobacco smoke, infections, exposure to some allergens early in the life may increase the chances of developing asthma. Other factors include exercise and viral infections. Some people have asthma only when they exercise or have a viral infection.

Martin Blaser of the New York University School of Medicine believe in the hygiene hypothesis which states that young children need to be exposed to lots of microbes for the healthy and normal development of their immune systems.

Dr. Blaser and fellow researcher Yu Chen have found that people who carry a once-common stomach bacterium called helicobacter pylori were 40 per cent less likely to have asthma at an early age than those who didn't carry the strain.

''Helicobacter is an ancient organism that everyone used to have in the stomach - and now it's disappearing,'' Dr. Blaser said.

''Less than 10 per cent of kids in Canada and the U.S. currently carry it ... At the same time, asthma rates have been rising.''