From Editor’s Desk – Dr. Sabir COPD 2014

Dear friends,
Today is ‘World COPD Day’. It is an annual event organized by the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) to improve awareness and care of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) around the world.

World COPD Day was first held in 2002 and every year over 50 countries worldwide take part in activities to raise awareness of COPD. This year the theme for World COPD Day- 2013 is:
“It’s Not Too Late”

This theme is chosen to promote the actions people can take to improve their own respiratory health – both before and after a diagnosis of COPD.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) which include chronic bronchitis and emphysema ; in lay man language refer to old age asthma, black asthma, cough of smoking(Bidi ki khansi) Dhama or Kala Dhama, is a major public health problem all around the world.

COPD the term itself is self explanatory to some extend as:
C- Chronic means persisting for long duration may not go away
O- Obstructive means partly blocked (air passages in lungs)
P – Pulmonary means related to lungs and
D- Disease means sickness.

COPD commonly starts in the middle age more frequently among men as compare to women and persons exposed to tobacco smoke (active or passive). Indoor air pollution from solid-fuel combustion (e.g. cow-dung, wood, agricultural waste) and air pollution from industry & automobile combustion, are other important risk factors specially in under developed and developing countries.

In developing countries other factors like unplanned urbanization and industrialization, poor industrial safety, poor traffic system, fast increasing number of vehicles with their poor maintenance and poor condition of roads are adding to out door air pollution.

Poor socio-economical status favors living in congested slums, unable to afford well ventilated kitchen & safe cooking fuel, further add to indoor air pollution & recurrent respiratory infections, all of them are important contributory factors for causation of COPD.

Globally with the advancement & expansion of medical facilities, many diseases are showing declining trend in their prevalence, but COPD related sufferings, deaths, loss of working hours, money spent on treatment are increasing.

Although disease is not completely curable but with the recent treatment modalities COPD patients can alive an active productive life with minimum symptoms or suffering, and their further lung damage can be prevented, especially if it is diagnosed in its early stage.

It is important to make collective efforts towards increasing awareness for early detection and adopting measures to check factors responsible for causation of COPD, through smoking cessation and improving quality of air.

On this COPD Day, ‘Public Forum” of Indian Chest Society has planned this humble effort to bring you all, near to renowned experts in the field of respiratory medicine through their brief write-ups on different aspect of COPD.

In this inaugural issue we have pulmonologists of international repute – Prof. P. Shankar , Prof. S.K. Jindal, Prof. A.G.hoshal, Prof. J.K.Samaria covering definition, prevalence, causation & early detection and treatment of COPD.

Friends you will be happy to know that now we have our own guidelines for the management of COPD considering Indian circumstances. Dr. Dheeraj Gupta who did the hard work under the patronage of Dr. S.K. Jindal in formulating these guidelines will be introducing the process of its evolution.

Further more in coming weeks more than twenty five write-ups on different aspects of COPD will be appearing on these web pages. For comprehensive information about COPD you can click “COPD: The terror of the 21st centuary” by Prof. Virendra Singh in English and lhvksihMh – 21 oha lnh dk vkrad in Hindi in on this website.

Please do send your comments & suggestions with your photo to me or Hon Sec. ICS. We will try to incorporate few selected in the forthcoming issues.

Winter months are worst time for COPD patients. Take care & be regular for the treatment. Be alert “It’s Not Too Late”. It’s better to be late than to never.

With regards,