Alliance Against Chronic Respiratory Diseases

A voluntary global alliance of 41 national and international organizations has been launched to focus on reducing the global disease burden of chronic respiratory diseases.

The Global Alliance Against Chronic Respiratory Diseases (GARD, Geneva, Switzerland), launched in March 2006 in Beijing (China), aims to achieve these goals by integrating and strengthening surveillance, prevention, and treatment efforts. The key objectives for GARD involve a comprehensive approach to fight chronic respiratory diseases, and in many cases this will build on existing initiatives. These include developing a standard way of obtaining data on risk factors and disease; defining strategies to establish GARD as a public health priority; encouraging countries to implement health promotion and chronic disease policies (such as tobacco control); and making recommendations on how to provide simple and affordable strategies for the management of chronic respiratory diseases for all patients in all countries.

''The goal of GARD,'' said Professor Jean Bousquet, an expert on respiratory diseases at the Hospital Arnaud De Villeneuve (Montpellier, France), and GARD chairman, ''is to reduce the global burden of chronic respiratory diseases. As the prevalence and global burden of chronic respiratory diseases are expected to increase considerably in the near future, it is clear that immediate action is greatly needed and the cost for inaction is unacceptable.''

Currently, hundreds of millions of people suffer from chronic respiratory diseases, including 300 million people with asthma, 80 million people with moderate to severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and millions of others with mild COPD, allergic rhinitis, and other chronic respiratory diseases, which are often undiagnosed. The World Health Organization (WHO, Geneva, Switzerland) estimates that some four million people died of chronic respiratory diseases in 2005 and that total deaths will increase by 30% in the next 10 years, if action is not taken now.



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Global Alliance Against Chronic Respiratory Diseases